Pilgrimage Art Project

For those who watched my art project in Kylie's new media course and asked me to reflect on why I created it, here are a few thoughts:

First and foremost the project was a response to the oversimplified division between Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives. The distinction fails on numerous counts to sort out different generations (people born before the 1980s-1990s can also feel at home in digital mediums) and it fails to distinguish different types of internet users (there are more options than just immigrating to, settling in, and being born in the digital age), worse of all the distinction polarizes the issue opposing those with digital savvy from those with little know-how. This polarization fits a deficit model so that digital immigrants are just written off as being too far behind the times to be helped. Although the 'anti-technology' camp that is down on technology might also argue that digital natives are too far with the times to be helped. The digital world is too much with them. So in response to this perspective I wanted to add the notion of another path, a way to think forward, and so i offered the idea of a digital pilgrim. A digital pioneer would also be appropriate, and hopefully others can think of even more ways that people are engaging with and affecting the digital world and themselves in the process.

But I wanted to do more than create a video response to Prensky's digital native digital immigrant divide. I wanted to create a project in the spirit of Tiffany's presented Wittgenstein language game experience in which the experience culminated not in the game itself but the performance it required of the audience members to examine their own limits with language and try to collaboratively forge a new language to reckon with and make sense of the words provided to them. Like Tiffany's project I wanted this video response to serve as what might be called a 'boundary object' a representation of a concept - in this case, the humanities concept of a pilgrimage - that elicits a response in the viewers such that by reckoning with alternative conceptions of a pilgrimage the audience members themselves might have to make explicit their own orienting idea and framing notion of what constitutes a pilgrimage. And so I asked the audience to write down words and thoughts they associate with a pilgrimage before and after the project, and led a discussion to see if anyone's list changed in response to the project.

By change, it is crucial to stress, i do not mean that people came to agree with the presented conception of pilgrimage but that people came to understand their own position more explicitly and to appreciate the contrasts of their position with others more perceptively. That is, I hope people came to expand and mature their position (which may have been previously just a taken-for-granted assumption prior to encountering alternative conceptions) and to understand the viability of others positions, and if the project was uber successful, I would hope a civil conversation pursued in which people openly and honestly came to understand and even constructively contest each others conceptions of the concept of a pilgrimage. The image of pilgrimage I projected was purposefully a bit off - I suggested a strong intimation between a pilgrim and what might be called a pioneer - in order to provoke the audience to make salient their own conceptions in response to this unusual perspective or coupling of pioneer/pilgrim.

It is my hope that this kind of project could be done for a large number of humanities concepts - asking people to reflect on their own orienting images of what constitutes an act of wisdom, or an act of forgiveness, or an act of charity, or of friendship, and so forth. When people bring different perspectives and begin to forge a new language (as in a new way to talk about and make sense of the variety of perspectives available and their attendant strengths and drawbacks) to understand and constructively contest each others ideas then I think something really positive and invaluable is happening.

Currently I am now rethinking if the boundary object - my art project - I created is the best way to elicit this sort of humanities-based constructive discourse. During my undergraduate years I majored in Psychology and Theology and loved nothing more than a good discussion on humanities issues - whether its discussion about the nature of time or redemption, the meaning of pandora's box and other myths, or a meandering discussion on what makes an act fulfilling and rewarding rather than just gratifying - and over time I developed different 'boundary objects' and 'class activities' to provoke these discussions. Sometimes they were skits, or piano recitals, other times they were prompts coupled with music and images, and they matured into the art projects I now make and presented. BUT the discussion following my project raised a curious idea in my mind - perhaps there is an approach I can take, a new sort of boundary object I can make, that is less didactic, less presenting itself as the received way to think about the humanities subject at hand (which was this medium's major drawback - it sort of presents itself as the truth to be agreed or disagreed with, or at least it runs the risk of doing so), and so I'd like to create a boundary object that takes on a constructionist approach where everyone physically draws their conception of the humanities term at hand (answering to the question: what constitutes an act of friendship? an act of wisdom? an act of mentoring? an act of civic engagement? etc) to get everyone's ideas out into the open - sharable and sociable - and made explicit for the audience at hand.

What I am currently imagining is five 'players' drawing up their notions of these ideas onto a 5 by 5 inch blank surface that is sticky on the back (kind of like an oversized name-tag) and then peeling off their image and sticking it onto one side of a 5 by 5 by 5 inch cube. This cube acts as the boundary object. and in the sort of discourse game i am drafting up right now, this cube is rolled, along with another cube (the discourse cube) that helps mediate a discussion between the roller and the creator of the image rolled. This way there is no didactic instructional material in the form of an art project, and instead just each players conceptions stuck to a cube that is rolled along with a discourse cube that prompts players to 'discuss' the object, 'contrast their view with the image of the cube rolled' to 'revise and redraw their view if necessary' 'to provide and deal adequately with counter-arguments or counter-views' 'to supplement their view with down-to-earth examples' etc. there would be 6 of these prompts, one for each side of the die, and the turn would be completed when the player who is the roller and the player who is the creator of the image rolled come to understand each other (not reach a consensus, but adequately make sense of the image drawn or of the contrasts, counterarguments, and so forth the image is called to deal with). This I believe will be my final studio project (although I am also working on remixing Candyland to become Candyland 2.0, multi-tasking edition and this might end up being the final project) but as far as my interests in creating boundary objects go and playtesting them I might craft up this board game and bring it to class as a 'party game' where players act like they do in pictionary or balderdash, drawing up images and making sense of each others images (i'll have humanities prompts along with language arts, science, and social sciences to make it diverse (imagine having to draw your interpretation of a story or myth, of a science phenomenon or an economic trend and hopefully you can imagine the party game fun and laughter that might come with this), as a way to provide the sort of experience i hoped my pilgrimage art project did and that tiffany's husband's wittgenstein's language games project did.

Looking forward,
The Untwitterable