Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Triptych Challenge

Triptych is a word from the greek words for three and fold. In normal usage, it means a work of art that is divided into three parts. i, however, am going to subvert the word for my own usage. My triptych challenge will be a game for you with the following rules: i will give you three themes. Your challenge is to come up with some work of art (book, song, video game, ...) that incorporates different subsets of those themes.

For example, if i give you Ocean, Music and Death, you might come up with Mr. Holland's Opus (music, not ocean or death), Crime and Punishment (death, not ocean or music), The Red Violin (music and death, not ocean), and Titanic (ocean, death and music).

The challenge is to come up with one example for every subset (A, B, C, AB, AC, BC, ABC, and, for good measure, none). One point for each subset. Bonus points would be given for completing all subsets as well as for constraining your answers to one genre (different amounts for different genres - could be movies (broad) or 19th century Russian novels (narrow)). i don't know that i'll actually give out points, but if i did, that's how i would score it - well, that and points via whim.

So here is your first set of themes: Royalty, Food and Sleep. Good luck! i'll post a comment later with what i come up with.

It's hard to come up with themes that are diverse enough to not overlap too much (so it's hard to find one without the other, like ocean and whale) but not so diverse (or narrow) that it's impossible to find anything that really has all of them, like aliens, dolphins, and rain (except for something like Douglas Adams' books).

2 unique comments:

Anonymous said...

I found this easier once I thought of a constraint. Though, I often find creative processes easier when they're constrained. It also helped that I picked a constraint that fit well with the triptych you proposed: Fairy Tales.

Royalty: Frog Prince
Food: Hansel and Gretel
Sleep: Rip van Winkle
Royalty, Food: Grimm tale The White Snake
Royalty, Sleep: Sleeping Beauty
Food, Sleep: Goldilocks
Royalty, Food, Sleep: Snow White
None: Jack and the Beanstalk

Turns out Royalty, Food was the hardest for me to think of, while some other categories had multiple possible choices (so, for Royalty, Sleep you can include Princess and the Pea, since the Pea doesn't serve the purpose of food in the story).

chad said...

Very well done! i had a couple of the same ones, but didn't make the leap to fairy tales. My list isn't complete. i definitely had trouble with the Royalty, Food one. The only thing i thought of was the Denethor and Pippen scene from The Return of the King. i also couldn't come up with a Food, Sleep answer. i thought about Se7en (gluttony, sloth), but i haven't seen it, so i'm not sure how well it would apply. Here's my list:

Royalty: Elizabeth
Food: Babette's Feast
Sleep: A Nightmare on Elm Street
Royalty, Food: ?
Royalty, Sleep: Sleeping Beauty
Food, Sleep: ?
Royalty, Food, Sleep: Snow White
None: Hoosiers