The following discussion about a proposed exercise for a high school or college class began in an email exchange yesterday with Bob, Virginia Kuhn and Karl Stolley (Virginia and Karl are both teachers of rhetoric and composition and great intellectual partners of the institute). We thought it was getting interesting so we decided to slap it up here on the blog as a thought experiment. Please join in the discussion in the comment stream.
Bob Stein wrote:
karl and virginia:
this is an idea for an exercise for a high school or college class. i’m wondering if you think it would be interesting/valuable for both students and for those of us interested in understanding the relation of different media types.
*Ways of Seeing, Ways of Writing*
class is divided into four sections. one given pad and pencil. one given digital still camera. one given audio recorder. one given video camera*
the class is asked to “write” about a place (local historical site, downtown street corner, mall, supermarket, cemetary, etc. etc. )
or asked to “write” a response to a question, e.g. “was the response of the federal govt. to the rescue of New Orleans residents affected by the fact that the people needing rescue were mostly poor and black.”
each group “writes” their description of the place or answer to the question using the particular media assigned to their group.
the class reviews all responses, then each group is asked to make a synthesis piece using media captured by all groups.
*if resources aren’t a problem, it would be great if each of the groups with electronic capture devices has more than one.
Karl Stolley replies:
Hmmm…this assignment does offer interesting possibilities. But I guess I’d be interested in the rationale behind splitting the media-producing and -capturing activities between groups. On the one hand, from a teacherly point of view, it’s quite convenient. But viewed from the analogy of a cooking class, it would be like giving each group a set of ingredients plus a kitchen appliance, and then asking each group to take some of the results and make a dish out of it. I know that’s riddled with all kinds of logical holes, but I have to try and interrogate this somehow.
The thing that bothers me most about the assignment is that there is a serious disconnect between the artful choices required to both capture/produce AND compose/orchestrate, as though those activities can be discreet and separate (that disconnect is what tends to make a lot of multimedia assignments feel like the old Surrealist “exquisite corpse” drawing game; if that’s the rhetorical goal, then fine–but that’s limited to a particular kind of stance towards orchestration).
Instead, wouldn’t it be better to give students the question, and then consider which kind of media would be most effective to capture based on the rhetorical situation they’ve been confronted with, have the groups delegate that task amongst themselves? Beginning with the distribution of media before the question is putting the media/genre cart before the rhetorical horse, I think.
Bob replies:
karl,
thank you for your very thoughtful reply. before make specific comments, perhaps i should explain the origin of the idea.
ashton (girlfriend) and i try to spend as much time at her godmother’s place in sardinia as possible. one of the big draws is an island, actually a big hunk o’ dolomite – two miles long and 1500 feet high- that dominates the view from the shoreline. because tavolara’s rockface is mostly white and gray it changes color all day with the sun. (a few photos from recent vist here.) i literally can sit and watch it for hours. it’s been a dream to bring a group of artists to capture its beauty. this year i was thinking that it might be interesting to bring a writer (think someone like john mcphee), a painter, a photographer, a video artist or filmmaker, and an experimental interactive artist like mike naimark or josh portway and let them all have a go at it. my guess is that each would be inspired and the results while quite different would all get at some aspect of the beauty.
at the same time i was thinking about capturing tavolara in various media, i was thinking a lot about the increasingly nettlesome text vs. image (especially moving image) debate. i’m pretty sure the solution is not to give up words in favor of images, but rather begin to appreciate the value of all media and work toward new forms of _expression which call on different media types at different points or which merge them in useful new ways. i was also thinking about how the insitute might start to play a more active role.
thus the idea of coming up with a series of exercises that might be used in college and high school which helped students begin to understand the relative value and utility of different media types and also begin to experiment with how to use them together.
Specific comments:
Hmmm…this assignment does offer interesting possibilities. But I guess I’d be interested in the rationale behind splitting the media-producing and -capturing activities between groups. On the one hand, from a teacherly point of view, it’s quite convenient. But viewed from the analogy of a cooking class, it would be like giving each group a set of ingredients plus a kitchen appliance, and then asking each group to take some of the results and make a dish out of it. I know that’s riddled with all kinds of logical holes, but I have to try and interrogate this somehow.
i think a better kitchen analogy would be giving everyone the same ingredients (in the sense that tavolara or a question is the same ingredient) but ask one group to use a grill, one group to use a pan on a stove, one group to use only a cuisinart etc. but anyway, the pedagogical reason to get the students to use one media type is so that they can appreciate its properties on its own.
The thing that bothers me most about the assignment is that there is a serious disconnect between the artful choices required to both capture/produce AND compose/orchestrate, as though those activities can be discreet and separate (that disconnect is what tends to make a lot of multimedia assignments feel like the old Surrealist “exquisite corpse” drawing game; if that’s the rhetorical goal, then fine–but that’s limited to a particular kind of stance towards orchestration).
my instincts are that one of the problems with “multimedia” is that few of us really understand the components, that is we don’t really know what the different types can do on their own. i guess i don’t think we are so far advanced that we can conceive of a new media type which is multimedia. e.g. i don’t think people intuitively grasp how impt. sound is to a movie until it’s pointed out and they have an oppty to focus on it.
Instead, wouldn’t it be better to give students the question, and then consider which kind of media would be most effective to capture based on the rhetorical situation they’ve been confronted with, have the groups delegate that task amongst themselves? Beginning with the distribution of media before the question is putting the media/genre cart before the rhetorical horse, I think.
i’m not wedded to my schema, but it still seems like there would be some fantastic discussions in the classroom as students look at the different results and debate the advantages and disadvantages. it seems that experience would be helpful when they later start to create full multimedia projects.
and then of course there is the issue of interactivity which complicates everything exponentially.
b.
The conversation continues in the comment stream.
Bob: “to understand the relative value and utility of different media types and also begin to experiment with how to use them together.”
I think this has real potential: a Rashomon for media types. Just as Kurosawa’s film explores the tangle of human subjectivity by telling the same story from four points of view, the experiment you describe explores the ways in which different media types hook into subjectivity. I agree with the underlying conviction that students cannot fully understand multimedia until they have explored its component parts and actively compared their effects. In the end, different students will arrive at different conclusions. Which is healthy.
Why not give each group pen and paper, audio, video, and still camera equipment and have them collaborate on a multiple media interpretation of a specific place, object, or question? Then compare the results. I imagine each team will have their own approach that rises out of their individual talents and skills as well as their preconceptions about what kind of media is appropriate for the story they want to tell. Seems like this would yield a more complex product with more food for thought.
My concern about the assignment is that it creates groups of specialists working separately. The writers are going to go off into their corner and write (probably without much discussion amongst themselves), photographers will photograph, etc… That’s a really 20th century way of thinking. The Ford assembly line concept where everyone does their special task and when you put it all together you’ve got a shiny new car. I think a more 21st century idea is how do you get the writers to take pictures and make movies? How do you get the filmmakers to write songs or poetry? The idea being–when artists work across disciplines they get a different view of the subject matter and a different view of their own discipline. This perspective helps to deepen their understanding of the larger concepts and (in theory) helps them to form a more sophisticated response to the question AND it strengthens the network.
I like what you have to say, Kim, about the problem of “specialist” groups.
I actually did a version of exactly this assignment in my Multimedia Writing class during Fall Semester, 2004. You can a full description of it at http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~stolley/2005/419/project02.htm.
(I don’t know if the comments accept the anchor tag, but if so, here’s a linked version of the assignment.)
As luck would have it, the students who posted their projects to the Web have since graduated, so the work is no longer available (the university clears out Webspace pretty quickly).
However, I’m preparing to do this assignment with my current Multimedia Writing class. I feel compelled to assign it soon, with some revisions based on this on-going discussion.
One might point out Raymond Queneau’s book Exercises in Style, where he takes it upon himself to tell the same (boring) story in 99 different ways. Matt Madden has an online project inspired by it where he’s presenting the same story in comic form many different ways. Both of these, however, are staying inside of a basic form (textual fiction, the comic strip).
i don’t have any problem with kim and karl’s approach in the abstract. having teams create multimedia works together is a fine thing to do. however, it really doesn’t address what i am trying to accomplish which is get students to appreciate the relative value and utility of different media types and THEN begin to experiment with how to use them together. karl and kim, please tell me how your exercise will help students understand the use/value of different media types?
Karl would be able to explain this much better than I can, since he’s taught the assignment. I’m just imagining, hypothetically, how it would go. If you give a student four media types and leave it up to his/her discretion to choose which types to use and how to get them to work in concert, then the student will have to explore this issue of relative importance; words will be prominent at some points in the story less important in other places, sound will recede or crescendo, image will fade or loom large, etc. I think it will be hard for the student to understand, in a hands-on laboratory way, how one media type is important relative to others, if you restrict the student to one media type.
My only real insight comes from the fact that I gave myself this assignment a few years ago. I tried using two different media types to write my daily journal. They were totally separate things; a written journal and an image journal. The images were taken with my digital camera. I made them conform to a certain format, one inch square images filling a 10 x 10 grid. Each grid represented one month. The images were mostly in chronological order except when it made aesthetic sense to put them somewhere else, but everything within the September grid must be taken in september. I did this for about five months starting September 2001 ending January 2002 and the results were interesting. The images were more abstract than the writing. I really got into a kind of shape rhyme thing, aerial views of my teacup rhymed with the shower drain for example. I think the abstraction, the repetition and the sheer density of the images gave a sense of what that month was like. The writing dealt with a different kind of thinking and a different kind of survey than the visuals but no less important relatively. In the end, I don’t think I would have the same insights without having struggled with both media types, finding their advantages and limitations on my own.
Just want to add on another idea re:Bob’s assignment. I wonder how useful it would be to do it backwards. Take a finished piece, say a scene from a documentary, and separate each of the media elements. Read the transcript outloud without the videotape, watch the videotape without sound, listen to the soundtrack without the words or the images. Then engage in a discussion about relative value.
Well, I think Kim’s project of the two personal journal types is a fine example of how we learn “relative value” of media types.
In my assignment, students are confronted by relative value because there is the demand at each step–planning/invention, capture, arrangement, editing–that students contend with the media they are working with.
What I see as a hindrance to our discussion is that perhaps we’re not addressing the “relative value” concept on the same terms. I get the sense, Bob, that you’re supposing that relative value erupts in your assignment at the moment students begin to work with the captured/generated material of the combined efforts of all the small groups. In other words, as I understand your assignment, it is the media product that serves the pedagogical aim of introducing the concept of the relative value of various media.
What I (and Karen, it seems) argue is that it is not merely the media product but also the device, and all of the choices that go into artfully using it, that provides students a sustained, possibly more robust encounter with relative media value.
I’ve heard of assignments that go something like this: send students out with cheap, throwaway cameras to shoot the most famous/iconic building on their campus. Almost every student will come back with photographs that look strikingly like postcards available in the campus bookstore.
The media product that the students deliver, then, is basically cliched and thus likely of little value. True, they are working with photographs of their own creation (tainted, of course, by the common representations on postcards, websites, and other university material)–but so what? The same photograph has been taken a thousand times over. It’s a scenario reminiscent of The Most Photographed Barn in America in White Noise.
It seems to me the most important value that students can learn about various media is the delicate choices required not only for using a media device to somehow “objectively” capture reality, but for using that device to shape and manufacture a visual product (and thus a subjective response to the world). And then in the process of orchestration, students see clearly, sometimes painfully, how those shaping choices set limits on the final multimedia product (no matter how much PhotoShop or iMovie skill they have).
Last night my nine-year-old son had a homework assignment to write down some numbers and explain what they were (“Mount Everest is 29,035 feet tall” was the example.) While he started by just copying numbers from a cereal box, he progressed pretty quickly when asked What’s the most interesting thing about that number? and stimulated to find something better than what was at hand. And soon, instead of putting down his home phone number he was deciding Which is the more interesting phone number to include, a fruit stand on the Embarcadero in San Francisco or the White House?
Bob Stein’s example of capturing tavolara made me think of the artist as someone who wants to find (wants to explore) what is interesting in a subject, in potentially any subject. And when you specify You use a camera. And you over there, you use an audio recorder each group learns about the medium because what it allows you to capture that is interesting is different from other media.
When Jan White was giving some seminars in the 1980s where I was working, he told me that he would take a single typeface and use it for every single design job he had for an entire year. He could make any typeface do what he needed, he said, but this way he found where a face worked readily and where it took a lot of effort to make it work.
So I’m inclined to prefer Bob’s type of assignment to Karl Stolley’s, where the task seems to be more of find an interesting subject rather than find out what is interesting about this subject. And limiting each of the students to one media, I think, would allow them grapple with that issue more directly, as well as to learn more deeply what the medium can convey easily. Of course, my son wouldn’t have found the trick to enjoying his homework without guidance, just as I would expect many students to lapse into the cliched or expected approach. But then that’s where the teacher comes in, playing the interlocutor.
— Roger Sperberg
Hi everyone:
Great conversation. Though I may be too late, I wanted to add a few meager thoughts…
I want to respond first to Kim’s comment about the potential for Bob’s assignment to create groups of “specialists working separately.” I think most of us would want to avoid that outcome, but equally problematic, I think, is the opposite extreme: a population of “media dilettantes,” or students who know a little about how images work, a little about how sound / music works, a little about how text works, but not enough about any of them to say something meaningful.
It might be useful to consider what it is about the emergence of multimedia as a compositional practice that encourages us to attack the whole authorship problem all at once. What’s the rush? A (music) composition student who ultimately wanted to write for an orchestra would be ill-advised to start with that medium — much better to get to know the instruments individually (write something for violins, then something for trumpets, etc.), and to start with smaller pieces, both structurally and temporally (e.g., 3-minute solo works). That is, start with many limitations, and then, one by one, take them away.
I didn’t get the sense from what Bob described that he was talking about his assignment as the end point in some hypothetical class, but rather that he was addressing a stage in the development of a more “fully multimediatized” authorship sensibility. One possible extension would be to have students do these sorts of exercises throughout the semester, but rotate the media assignments so that at some point everyone has an opportunity to do the initial “writing” with each of the available media technologies. I imagine that going through that process might enable students to bring everything together with perhaps greater success; i.e., when the time comes to create a true multimedia project.
I am glad Andrew alerted me to this post. There’s a lot to scroll through already, but I hope you don’t mind me jumping in.
First I have to say, Bob, your “text” group seems to have gotten the short end of the stick with pencil and paper. I am assuming you mean them as a placeholder for any inscription technology, but the choice is pregnant with meaning in this context.
After reading the discussion I had to go back and reread the original assignment. There is an elegant twist to the overall assignment that I think gets lost in the wording, and is not therefore picked up in the discussion. I’ll paste the passage here so you don’t have to go back and look for it:
“each group “writes” their description of the place or answer to the question using the particular media assigned to their group.
the class reviews all responses, then each group is asked to make a synthesis piece using media captured by all groups.”
The last part seems to come as an afterthought, but it is critically important. The effect is not so much comparative, as Ben suggests with the analogy to Roshamon. Rather it is in the singular experience each group (and their collective utterance) undergoes as they move from stage one to stage two of the assignment.
Here I am reminded of another concept from early 20th century (sorry, Kim) poetic theory, the “dominant.” As awful as it sounds now, this idea could be productively resurrected in this context and dusted off a little.
The point is that students use the particularity of a single assigned medium as a structuring (or “deforming”) element in the organization of multiple media. The dynamic interaction between layers of meaning that play out in the final “synthesized” product is precisely the effect that Tynianov once described as the characteristic feature of poetic (as opposed to prosaic) language (in general I think poetic theory is highly relevant to the study of multimedia communication).
To preserve this effect, I would tweak the assignment slightly (to take it even further from the comparative, Roshamon model) and pull out the group review/debrief at the interim stage. Each group would do stage one in isolation, and simply make its assets available to other groups for stage two. Otherwise the organic coherence of each group’s “message” would be infected by ideas and meanings from the other groups during the critical transition between stages, and the number of variables for deconstructing this experiment afterward would be too many to be instructive.
Comparison and reflection would come at the end.