Webspinna Battle

“I want my son back. I–I–my son–my son–“

“You can’t have him. You can’t have him–can–can–wicwic–can’t have him”

Two couples argue to some funky electronic beats, their voices scratching like an old record. First it’s Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep from Kramer vs. Kramer. Then Adam Sandberg bursts in with angsty clips from “Threw it on the Ground.”  Then it’s the selfish seagulls from Finding Nemo shouting “Mine!” while Alfalfa and The arguments are thrown and remixed back and forth from one computer to the next. It sounds like a mess. 

It’s a fight to the death. 

A Webspinna fight to the death. 

Unfortunately the fight ends with King Solomon suggesting to cut the child in half, which is obviously an impossible task for the two parents, both of whom have legal right to claim the child.

Webspinna is an interesting concept. It’s performance art, the kind you only get to experience once because it happens live and is impossible to re-create exactly. No video cameras––no cameras at all, actually. The experience is recorded in memory only. But it's art. Or rather, a memory of art. 

Tabby and I had the idea to portray adults fighting the same way kids fight. We wanted to show how we don’t change all that much, particularly with things that strike deeply. The idea morphed into a child custody case–a very painful reality for a lot of people. There are no easy endings and the process is rarely clean cut and evenly mixed. A live battle of Internet audio was the perfect medium. It didn’t go at all as planned; the funky beats ended three quarters of the way through which left us going back-and-forth a Capella. But it was honest. And it worked.

Coming up with content to tell our story was surprisingly easy. So much of our vernacular is not our own. Author Jonathan Lethem wrote an article detailing how plagiarism is an everyday part of how we communicate. Our words and how we use them come from infinite sources that we are unknowingly immersed in. At home, my family and I communicate a lot through movie quotes. My mom challenged us to go a whole day without quoting any movies. It never happened. Lethem explains that we may conceive of an idea quite honestly and fail to recognize the source from which we are robbing. So we rob, then we take what we’ve robbed and we put it through our own lenses to communicate something uniquely ours. It’s not new; it’s just reorganized and juxtaposed material. 

Probably the best analogy to a Webspinna battle is in Scott Pilgrim v. The World. The movie is rife with references to pop-culture and it’s ancestry and includes seven epic and totally ridiculous battles between Scott and various archetypes. Everything in the film came from somewhere else. But what make it unique, and what makes our voices unique is how its all assembled.