Doomsday

The following is a working plot for my short story. This plot will, very likely, change through out the course of this semester:

In the year 2015, Islamic fundamentalists gained access to the atomic bomb. However, as the whole world waited for a nuclear explosion nothing happened. The American CIA developed and deployed (just in time) a neurotoxin that affected their capacity for emotion (positive or negative). With their passion for martyrdom gone, the terrorists were harmless.
Governments around the world see the potential for such a compound and, soon enough, the medication has begun to creep into the food supply (disguised as essential vitamins and minerals). The only capacity that humans are left with in this world is that of pleasure because “pleasure” is the result of much more primitive brain mechanisms. People do things because it feels good and not because they can anticipate long-term goals. Society is kept in line with severe punishments since humans since perceive pain very well.
This concept of the “normal” becomes the intellectual goal of the individuals in this society. In this constant search for normalcy, people have no time to consider any other philosophical problems. The only goal of academia is to make people more “normal.” There are no artists in this world because the chemicals make creative expression much more difficult.
However, despite the fact that humans do not have emotion, they do seem to want something other than this mundane life. A very small minority yearned for a Messiah to bring them into a world where thoughts and life was not so structured.

My proposal for the Creative Project is to redesign the Game of Life to fit a more apocalyptic vision. Using the Book of Revelations, class movies and readings, and outside sources for reference, I’d like to chart a fun and interactive roadmap from the breaking of the first seal to the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Along the way will be pit stops for nuclear annihilation, a night with Jezebel, melted ice caps, and more.
Game pieces will include a spinner (with 6 appearing three times, of course), player tokens (four horsemen, St. John, the Lamb, the dragon/Antichrist, etc.), Sin cards in place of Salary cards, Doom tiles in place of Life tiles, which can be either damning or redemptive, and the game board itself. At the end of the game, players will “retire” either to Heaven or the lake of fire, depending on their sins and the content of their Doom tiles.

Project Proposal
Music Video “The Revelation of St. John the Divine”
Daniel Cowen

The Revelation of St. John the Divine is a youtube channel of ancient horror played over and over again in the wee hours of the morning. Between the beast, septuple-eyed lamb, horn blowing angels and “silence in heaven about the space of half an hour,” Revelation is teeming with sound, silence and rampant visuals. This music video will portray the Book of Revelation through its sensory descriptions alone, meaning outside the context of divine wrath.

Visuals such as a mouth chewing on paper (as John ate the book), the red and white horses, a sea of glass mingled with fire, the leopard/bear/lion/dragon beast, the angel clothed in a cloud with a rainbow on its head and its face a sun and feet pillars of fire and of course, Jesus with a massive, scary sword coming out of his mouth will create a traumatic phantasmagoria that will give the audience a taste of Revelation’s terror. The video will be cut so as to maintain a beat with the sounds of an image, i.e. chewing paper will occur at rhythmic internals as a sound and visual. The video should feel like a bad trip and will be based entirely on the text.

Some could argue that the Book of Revelation should be understood within a social context lest one disregard the profound effect that Revelation has had on both religious and secular culture. It could also be considered blasphemous to extract the imagery from Revelation from the context of divine judgment.

The purpose of this piece is to isolate the horror of the text, and through this hyper-literal approach create a traditional yet postmodern reading by focusing on the horror rather than who will and won’t be saved.

While Americans watched the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bomb, they realized that the “weapon to end all wars” could just as easily end the world as they knew it. The United States became a campaign of misinformation to soothe the anxieties of its people.

I will research the U.S. government’s official safety procedure for a nuclear attack at the height of the Cold War, focusing mainly on bomb shelters. I will visit several bomb shelters around New York City to get images of the spaces, as well as create a map marking the distance between shelters in a particular neighborhood.

I want to do a documentary exploring the various ways Americans prepared themselves in the event of an atomic bomb attack. I will interview three Americans who lived during the height of the cold war era. One will be someone who was in elementary school, someone who was in high school, and someone who was an adult. These interviews will provide insight into the mindset of American society at the time. Did they think hiding under a desk would save their life? Did they think that a basement would provide adequate protection from a nuclear blast?

Finally, I will research the U.S. government’s current safety procedure for a nuclear attack. I will follow this up with several interviews about what Americans today would do if they knew America were soon to be hit with an atomic bomb.

This project will be a multimedia project, integrating photographs, video interviews, and stock footage of public service announcements.

Apocalyptic Scrapbook

I propose to create a scrapbook of newspaper articles dealing with apocalyptic thought. By tracking the development and adaptation of apocalyptic thought throughout the Vietnam War in mass media, one might find greater insight into the evolution of modern endism during wartime. I am hoping to find a clear evolution from the end of the world theories of yesteryear to the nuclear apocalyptic thinking that dominates society.

The presentation of the concept will be a scrapbook full of annotated newspaper clippings.  To do this, I will comb through the New York Times archive of past articles, conveniently collated in an online database, and see how the end of the world is portrayed. The clippings will appear in chronological order, which will help the reader see the gradual change in mentality toward the apocalypse. I will include a timeline of major events during the Vietnam War as well. Hopefully, seeing the date of the edition and the current events of the time will help in locating the source of the trends in apocalyptic thinking.

The Vietnam War was the first war fought by the United States after the creation of nuclear weaponry. With the Doomsday clock five minutes to midnight and the pictures taken of Hiroshima still ringing in the public consciousness, the media had ample opportunity to explore the possibility of Armageddon. Thus was the concept of nuclear Apocalypse was born.

I believe that theories on how the end of the world will come about stem from the fears of the time. In the first millennium, famine was an ever-looming specter, and the end of humanity could easily come from starvation. This fear is given apocalyptic status in the Bible as the black horse from Revelations. (Revelations 6:6) The idea that visions of the Apocalypse form from the current events is exemplified in the nuclear holocaust scenario, which is derived from the development of atomic weaponry in the world during the Cold War era, and really given life during the Vietnam War.