As mentioned during the Media Inquiry #2 assignment, I experienced “Bust Down the Doors” in two formats. The first viewing occurred when I had Internet access but no speakers, therefore I watched the presentation without its music or sound. Regardless, perhaps due to the rigid rhythm the text appeared on the screen, the text played in my mind’s ear to its own drum beat. Moreover, since the BDtD repeated text over and over with changes only to the pronouns, this internal rhythm was further and further cemented into my brain and by proxy, my bias.
Therefore, when I later returned to BDtD when I had both Internet and speaker access, I felt like I was watching a whole other piece. I found the background music actually distracting to the text since the drum beats did not line up perfectly. Suddenly, the symmetry that I initially imagined in the piece was replaced by asymmetry. Regardless, I sat through BDtD in its entirety both with and without sound, and then recorded my observations with both versions.
Again, during the mute version, the focus was automatically on the text since that was the only stimulus available. It didn’t take long for the intent to become apparent when the second version began to play on screen and all the pronouns were replaced. Suddenly my interest was piqued in how much the context of the work changes when the characters’ identities are switched again. Two perspectives I focused on in the inquiry were the woman versus the man version, and the man versus woman, each scenario being the offender and victim, respectively.
In the second viewing with the sound, as mentioned before I found the music distracting. But what was interesting to note was that although the background drum beats were dissonant and therefore matched the piece in meaning, it too looped and repeated. However, it sound be noted that end and beginning did not match up with the end and beginnings of the text, most likely because the music did not last as long in duration in comparison to the text.
Overall, I enjoyed and appreciated the intent of this piece. On one last note, it’s interesting to compare both my initial bias towards watching the piece mute and the gender or social biases within our perceptions. In other words, I preferred watching BDtD without sound because that was the manner of my first experience. In the same vein, there are also different emotional reactions to watching “them” commit horrible crimes to “you,” or “he” dragging “she” out into the street then shooting her into the head. All these things and how we view them are heavily reliant upon our personal perceptions as well as our past experience forms us.