Skill, Digital Creation and memory

 

I have always thought digital creation as a potential shortcut to help creators leapfrog traditional barriers created by skill. The core idea is that software, such as iMovie, Adobe apps, can help individuals be creative with a low skill threshold. I am attempting to do exactly that on my iPad. However, I am still struggling with results finding myself repeatedly reaching out to physical materials and their subsequent digital manipulation with existing media. 

This idea of new boundaries of creativity allows me to rethink about affordances of the latest technologies and my skills within them. The images I collect and create are reorganized and even layered in ways that rephrase the bluntness of my message. For example, in the image to the right, I started reflecting in writing about my relationship with scraps of paper as ephemeral representations of my life. Messages to self, lists of steps, ideas, doodles, and even notes about what I will say next in my meeting. All of these I throw away with glee once I dem them unuseful or past expiration date. For the first time, I tried to reflect on why I may feel this way? I have so much joy in presenting a clean slate and reinventing myself. One of the reviewers for my promotion file asked (and I am paraphrasing), "Who is this Guy?" 

For someone who has stayed put for 20 years in the same place and job, I seem to be constantly reinventing myself, perhaps pathologically so. Maybe that is why I find the internet's inability to forget us and the things we have done so frightening. My current interpretation is that it links up with the multigenerational experiences of repeated migration. And as usual still processing. 

Personal Reflection on Cultural Appropriation and Cowboy Hats

This reflection is in no way an attempt to define or argue the boundaries of cultural appropriation. Instead, I am attempting to think about what cultural appropriation means to me as a Jewish/ Israeli immigrant to the United States, who is nonetheless white, educated, abled, and doing well for myself.

When I started wearing cowboy boots a few years ago, I was not confident about my ability to "pull it off" and I was worried about appearing to be appropriating a culture that I did not belong to. One afternoon I brought that up with Al Steckelberg, a native Nebraskan, and a friend, he waved me off and said: "we all used to wear western gear, we were all pretending". I love my cowboy boots and recently added a hat (at least in the sun). As I sat in my backyard in my hat I was intrigued by the shadow my hat made. The shadow created a distance and felt like it was not me but some other. It led me to a new journal page that became a collage. To the collage, I added detail from a painting by Eakins c. 1888 and a Jewish Gaucho in Sante Fe Argentina. 

As an immigrant to the US, I am always in the process of figuring out how I belong. I live in the liminal space between my past culture in Israel and the culture I live in now. As a result, I often find myself appropriating language, expression, and communication styles in an effort to find a place. The process itself is inherently flawed and often I find myself trying out patterns that cause the people I am interacting with to give me a second and third look. I have a sense that I crossed some boundaries but since most of the boundaries are not articulated clearly and never spoken out I am not always sure what caused the reaction. 

In some ways, I wear cowboy boots and hat as a way of defying expectations. In Nebraska, I am often the first Israeli ex-pat people have ever met, doubly so when it is cowboy boots wearing Isareli. At the same time, the cowboy image in popular culture and in real life is linked to masculinity and freedom. Finally, I believe that the cowboy image connects me to a sense of place (the great plains are the birthplace of the classic cowboy boot), and at the same time allows me to connect to Jewish cowboys and Gauchos- a pocket culture that nevertheless existed.

Clean Your Windows so you can see the fireflies

 I am continuing my journaling journey. This week I started thinking about my learning for the week while cleaning the windows in my living room. One of my sons came in and asked: Don't you have people that do that? Yes, I answered: but I love cleaning the windows occasionally. I get so used to the dirty-ish window that I stop noticing it. I sit in the chair and look outside, accepting the dirty window as part of the view. I literally forget that it is just a distortion that I have some power over and that I can remove. 

As I was cleaning, I realized that it was an interesting metaphor that calls on me as a researcher to stop, slow down, and examine what in my process of looking at the world needs cleaning. Is the distortion I see a result of dirt/noise in my control? This can go to weak beliefs and theories that stop me from seeing clearly. It can be unrelated (yet powerful) emotion or just constant activity that prevents me from realizing what I need to be paying attention to.

This may also be true of the devices and apps we use to see the world, algorithms, scanning, and attentional processes obscure what there is to see. Once in a while, we need to stop and clean our windows making sure that we are doing our best to see what is out there. Making what we are seeing is not just the distortion on our window.

This is my Journal page, I noticed that my processing has many more questions than answers or solutions. It could very well be that many of the questions are the ways I am scaffolding my process, or it could be that this early in the research into Art TEAMS, there are questions with answers pending. Leading to one of the only declarations: I have more questions than answers.

I am still leaning on the firefly metaphor. Systemic change is tough, and most of the time, efforts to innovate and make change are limited to our immediate environment. The light fireflies make is the light of individual change agents. While making the world better for others (very few for a short time), we are also looking for others like us to collaborate with us. 

In many ways, the grant is trying to help new fireflies increase their signal, find their light, and join the other fireflies. Yes, there is a slight chance of systemic change, but even if that does not happen, we change ourselves and the lives of our students. The role of projects and universities is to create communities of fireflies. Places where they are safe, cherished and supported, so they can continue.

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So I went to NAEA for the first time

The National Art Education Association meeting was in New York City this spring. Despite many years of being involved in arts integration, I have never had the opportunity to go. This year after our grant application for Art TEAMS was funded Was a great opportunity to go.