March 2009 Archives

What kinds of media would first-graders make? USC professor Tara McPherson tackled that question in a seminar last semester with her undergrads, who were asked to think about a media-enhanced curriculum for first- and second-graders at Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts in Hollywood. "The goal was to integrate technology into LFCSA's own learning goals and methods, rather than focus on technology for technology's sake," Tara explains. "LFCSA has limited technology, so the idea was to find low-resource platforms." Tara notes that the course itself, titled "Digital Media and Learning," was a chance for students at USC "to engage in project-based learning as they studied theories of learning and media in the digital era, reviewed the 1st and 2nd grade curricula at LFCSA, and then looked for technology platforms that we could incorporate easily into the classroom." The students spent several weeks in first and second grade classrooms and worked with the younger students on tech projects that dovetailed with what the teachers were already working on. What did the younger students come up with?

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The Horizon Report highlights the key technologies destined to transform education in the coming years. Published by the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, the report offers an interesting picture of education in the near future. As a board member for NMC, I worked on the version for higher education, but for the first time, NMC this year also created a version centered on K-12 education, and the results are fascinating. "Technology is increasingly a means for empowering students, a method for communication and socializing and a ubiquitous and transparent part of their lives," claims the report. Technology may have isolated kids in the past, the writers argue, but now it can be a key means for student learning. This point also suggests the fluidity among communicating, socializing and learning; these activities are no longer necessarily separate. The report is not naive - it also highlights key challenges: many schools don't have basic technical infrastructures and teachers often don't have much experience with various technologies. In California, there are several initiatives designed to combat these challenges. I sat in on a session hosted by the James Irvine Foundation last week as participants from various schools and a group called ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career worked together on ideas for a curriculum that will teach media arts, both critically and as a set of skills for use in the job market. Transforming education faces daunting obstacles, and the need for engaged students with access to technologies demands creative solutions. The NMC reports offer some of these solutions. You can find both reports and information on how they were created here.

Continuing the focus on visual presentations, two nights ago I talked with Anne Burdick, who chairs the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. In her own work, Anne has focused a lot on the intersection of writing, design and the book, and is exploring notions of "transmedia" publications. So it should come as no surprise that her conference presentations are jaw-droppingly beautiful. For example, she gave a talk for the MAKE Symposium on Design Research at Parsons called "Designing: A Research Practice, or Tools and Spaces for Reading and Writing" and the presentation component, made in Keynote, is breathtaking. A large section of it is organized around a very wide photo of a wall on which she physically pinned up a series of images and sticky notes that build a 10-year annotated timeline. The presentation glides back and forth along this panel, zooming gently in and out to highlight key ideas in a method that can only be described as cinematic. There are no cheesy transitions, and not a bullet point anywhere. Instead, form follows content to chart a history of thought as if you are in motion with the ideas; indeed, it's like inhabiting "a space for reading and writing."

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Sometimes I have the best job! This week I've been interviewing people about their presentations - the talks they do at conferences and other events - and it's fascinating hearing how people "write" in the hybrid form that is the visual/verbal presentation. I traded emails yesterday with Julian Bleecker about his presentations, which are stellar. Julian is a designer, technologist and researcher at the Design Strategic Projects Studio at Nokia Design in Los Angeles; he's also the co-founder with Nicolas Nova of the Near Future Laboratory, their design-to-think studio. I think of Julian also as a public intellectual in the sense that he actively cultivates a world of shared ideas and experimentation. One of the things about Julian's presentations is that they're visually rich - it's not just that his images are beautiful and provocative, often working at the level of metaphor. And it's not just that he plays with scale, repetition and pattern. It's that the visuals and the words and the "performance" of the presentation all meld in very pleasurable ways. Plus, he "works" the material for a while, until the ideas take shape in some new form...

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Doing some research on the presentation styles of various designers yesterday I stumbled across A Communications Primer, a 21-minute film from 1954 by the husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames from the Prelinger Archives on the Internet Archive. I know the significant role played by the LA icons with regard to architecture and furniture design, and I know the classic Eames films - Powers of Ten and House: After Five Years of Living, for example - which showcase the pair's agility in conveying complex ideas through clarity of design. But A Communications Primer is new to me and I immediately appreciated the deft overview of the basic process of communication as a message moves from a sender to a receiver, with a long discussion of the impact of noise on the signal. The film also nicely articulates the ways in which messages and codes are cultural and that real communication relies on a complex matrix of factors, beyond simply the clarity of the message sent. But the film also showcases the aesthetic genius of the team. They frequently use abstract images, for example, and are able to find pleasing patterns in the everyday world. Literal representation morphs into design, and the entire film illustrates the power of visual communication in demonstrating ideas. And it's a nice reminder that moving image design certainly predates the advent of After Effects!

LA-based media artist Jordan Crandall recently announced the launch of a new online journal called Version, which responds to the artist's desire to collect and share short missives rooted in philosophy, art, cultural studies or any other field but that intersect with contemporary lived life. Version, explains the "About" section, "presents scenes, incidents, encounters, and sensory experiences drawn from everyday life, in which concepts are not only elaborated but enacted." In terms of format, each "item" must adhere to strict constraints: 500 words, 5 images or 50 seconds. There are currently nine projects in Version, including Benjamin Bratton's "Stacks" (pictured here), consisting of five images, each containing strips and blocks of images that are themselves broken into repeated near-grids. While it's tempting to try to discern each fragment's identity, it's more pleasurable to simply witness the play of color, pattern and repetition. Lucky Dragons, an LA-based collaborative effort by Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck, offers a breathy song, while Leslie Stern's submission is the deliciously wordy "Wormy Words" text. Here, herrings become words that stand in for ideas in a passage that wiggles back and forth through gardening, writing, thinking and being. The piece ends with a provocative line: "Between calculus and chance, you play a game, aiming always, like that wily old weeder Cicero, to persuade and move and delight." Exactly - and that may indeed be Crandall's game with Versionas well, to persuade, move and delight.

Last week, students in my undergrad class at USC analyzed visual essays, a growing and dynamic genre that combines writing, graphic design and motion to tell a story or make an argument. The class? It's called "Methods in Scholarly Multimedia," which sounds just awful, but it's actually quite fun. (Or at least I think so.) The idea is to look at the potential of various media forms - images, video, audio and interactivity - to enhance what we do as scholars, whether we're writing papers, giving presentations or doing research. In addition to learning to read and write with critical sophistication, my students learn how to take and manipulate pictures; how to shoot, edit and distribute video; and how to create an interactive experience that demonstrates an argument. And they learn how to analyze examples of media. So the topic during our last class was the visual essay, and one of the videos we scrutinized was Iran: A Nation of Bloggers by Aaron Chiesa, Toru Kageyama, Hendy Sukarya and Lisa Temes, studenst at the Vancouver Film School...

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The new issue of the scholarly media journal Flow is online, and includes an interesting article by UC Santa Barbara associate professor Lisa Parks on cell phone antenna trees. Titled "Around the Antenna Tree: The Politics of Infrastructural Visibility," the essay charts the history of cell phone tower concealment since its beginnings in the 1990s when residents protested the installation of bare towers for aesthetic, health and economic reasons. In response to complaints, cell phone companies resorted to crafting "stealth towers" designed to hide the true purpose of the steel structures. Parks notes that, in addition to various kinds of trees, towers have been camouflaged as "flagpoles, church steeples, mosque minarets, crosses, and grain silos among other things," adding that one company even created a custom tower that looks like an osprey nest. What's the big deal?

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I've been reading Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, a collection of essays edited by Megan Boler and just came across Graham Meikle's chapter titled "Whacking Bush: Tactical Media as Play." He's writing about tactical media practices, those that are subversive, critical and often funny, like the multiple George Bush remixes and mash-up videos (specifically Bushwhacked by Chris Morris and Wax Audio's "Imagine This"). Tactical media projects are hit-and-run gestures rather than sustained political movements, and Meikle says at one point that we need to ask of an activist video not "does it work?" but instead "does it play?" What's the difference? Play, he argues, acknowledges that these projects are enjoyable and engaging; they inspire the imagination and prompt creative responses; and they contribute to a form of bonding, in part around media practice. In short, they are part of a participatory culture rather than one based merely on communication, and they encourage further play. So, with that in mind, does the recent film Flooded McDonald's by Superflex play, moving beyond remix to a more conceptual musing? Maybe...