http://www.vsw.org/ai/
Introduction
MIND OVER MATTER: MODERN MEDIA LITERACY
Karen vanMeenen
According to an established and oft-quoted definition from the Aspen Institute Report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy in 1989, media literacy is “the ability to access, analyze, communicate and produce media in a variety of forms.” Even more comprehensive definitions have arisen since, such as this from the New Mexico Media Literacy Project, highlighting the production aspect: “the ability to create media, including understanding the ‘text’ (surface content) and ‘subtext’ (hidden meanings) in messages received from: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, billboards, signs, packaging, marketing materials, video games, recorded music, the Internet, and other media.” While definitions have changed, media literacy scholars, researchers, educators, and activists agree on the import of such endeavors, whether it be for the purposes of enhancing critical thinking skills, raising consciousness, creating more active and prepared civic participants or some combination of these and other practical and ideological intents.
Features
MEDIA LITERACY AND THE TYRANNY OF THE NARRATIVE
Kathleen Tyner
Media literacy seeks to address the proliferation of new literacy practices in an increasingly mobile, global, digital world. Broadly analogous to print literacy, media literacy promotes the analysis (reading) and production (writing) of texts in a variety of forms. In practice, conflicting assumptions about the definitions, practices, and impact of media literacy are at the heart of contentious debates about its fundamental aims, purposes, and value. Consequently, as media literacy promotes greater access to a wider range of tools and texts, it is increasingly mired in age-old debates about the uses of literacy to frame, shape, and control public discourse. In the process, it touches on the relationships between media literacy, cultural narratives, and the arts.
FACEBOOK, THE IMAGE, AND THE VIRTUAL CEDAR BAR
Jill Conner
By early 2009, the art world migrated away from the waning excitement that once swirled throughout galleries, cafés, and bars, only to continue more cohesively within the new, alternative social networking website Facebook. During the last six months of 2008, there was a 267 percent increase in Facebook members between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-four.1 Founded in 2006 by former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook became a free, image-based utility that relied upon users’ thumbnail portraits to secure online social connections. It also embraced multi-media, similar to MySpace, but set itself apart in an attempt to achieve a sense of authenticity within a highly pirated, dishonest, and potentially ominous online environment.
THE POWER OF FAIR USE FOR MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATION
Renee Hobbs
A little animated bird lands on the windowsill of a big building in urban America, where it begins to sing: “Copyright’s for the people | Copyright is to promote creativity | Balancing rights of owners and users of intellectual property.” But a character named Big C, high up in one of the skyscrapers, argues with the little bird, singing, “I’m an owner, not a donor, copyright’s for me | Let me tell you how it’s gonna be | I’m the one who knows | Look at all the things I own | All the copyrights I hold | All under my control | Copyright’s for the folks who own.”
ANALOG TO DIGITAL: THE INDEXICAL FUNCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES
Corey Dzenko
Marshall McLuhan describes the impact of new media with the phrase “the medium is the message.” McLuhan’s “medium” is any extension of the human senses and he focuses on media such as print, photographs, telephones, and weapons throughout his text Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). McLuhan’s “message” explains the way a new medium affects a culture, “for the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”1 He provides the railway as an example. This medium “did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human function, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.”2 Similarly, digital photography “accelerates” or “enlarges” traditional photographic processes. Digital technology allows for greater ease in editing than analog photography, because it transforms photographs from objects into data. Thus, digital imaging technology theoretically disrupts previous notions of the indexical connection between photographic images and “reality.” Digital photography challenges the historical belief that photography is representative of reality. But have viewers’ perceptions shifted in relation to theoretical discussions? While digital technology affects the theoretical notion of the photographic index, these theories overlook the appearance of the image and the social applications of transparent lens-based media. Viewers continue to read digital photographs as representative of reality, a f
CITY AS SCREEN / BODY AS MOVIE
Holly Willis
Let’s start with a photograph taken by Hiroko Masuke—of a billboard featuring an ad for the television miniseries The Andromeda Strain that was printed in the New York Times a year ago.1 The billboard includes a large, horizontal poster for the series, along with a video display showing clips embedded within the poster. What’s not visible, however, is a small video camera (made by the company Quividi) that records passersby as they look at the billboard. The company has developed what it calls the “automated audience measurement solution,” which documents visitors who look at the billboard, channeling the information into a database, from which it decodes the data. It examines factors such as the overall height of viewers, as well as facial features, including cheekbone height and the measurement of space between the nose and chin. The goal is to determine gender and age, and although the company says it does not yet factor for race, it plans to soon.
CONVERGENCE CITIZENS: THE NEW MEDIA LITERACY OF PRE-SCHOOL TELEVISION
Amy Shore
When Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969, the media landscape for pre-school-age children was limited to what we now refer to as “old media” technologies: television, radio, and print media. The show’s innovative programming design, which integrated animation, live action “street” scenes, and segments featuring lovable Muppets, aimed to use television as a tool to foster early acquisition of language, math, and social skills. Sesame Street also addressed what would become one of the central goals of the media literacy movement of the 1970s: encouraging children to become “active users” of media rather than “passive consumers” of “interactive” programming models. In the days of the old media landscape, such interactivity took the form of children responding to on-screen characters (counting along with the Count) and recognizing the mediated nature of their televisual experience (actors looked directly into the camera/at the audience while simultaneously interacting with fictional muppets in Mr. Hooper’s store, on their front stoops, and even in the trashcans lining Sesame Street).
LOST LITERACY: HOW GRAPHIC NOVELS CAN RECOVER VISUAL LITERACY IN THE LITERACY CLASSROOM
Cary Gillenwater
Our society is dominated by imagery. From television to films to magazines to the internet—we are saturated with it. Yet, in schools, many educators persist in teaching a onedimensional concept of literacy, while students learn to negotiate their out-of-school experiences with images via informal, ad hoc methods picked up from personal trial and error, peers, and from the media itself. Educators inadvertently neglect, devalue, and/or misuse images due to an ideological (and subsequently naturalized) preference for print literacy.1 James Gee argues this preference is not validated scientifically, but socioculturally.2 It is necessary for someone to be able to read and write in order to fill out a job application; therefore, print literacy is beneficial in our society. Conversely, if it were requisite for a person to be able to interpret and create art to get a job, then visual literacy would be the preferred mode of literacy. Implied in this argument is the neglect of visual literacy, i.e., the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from, and with, images.3 This definition offers us a point from which to explore the commonalities between print and visual literacies, since print literacy also involves interpreting, negotiating, and making meaning from text, i.e., reading comprehension.4 Developing skills in visual literacy considerably augments a person’s ability to interpret his or her world by providing additional modes of making meaning. When students are denied a balanced literacy repertoire, the possibility of learning to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from media (practices used with more frequency than those of print literacy because they are more relevant to their daily lives) is arrested.5 I do not advocate a rejection of print literacy, but rather, an acknowledgement that it is one of many literacies necessary to make meaning from our lived experiences. The graphic novel is a medium through which both print and visual literacy can be taught.
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CONNECTING CULTURES: NEW DYNAMICS IN GLOBAL MEDIA LITERACY
Paul Mihailidis
In the current hypermedia age, the borders of information are increasingly indistinguishable. There now exist few, if any, limits to how far, fast, and wide messages may travel. Across the globe—from the growth of community internet in rural Europe and the Middle East,1 to the expansion of cell phone technology in India2 and Africa, our media-saturated world is shrinking.
Essays
GORBACHEV IN DISNEYLAND
Robert A.B. Sawyer
The ostensible purpose of this Louis Vuitton ad is to promote the company’s luggage line by highlighting a popular bag known as a duffle. The work, like many of its kind, features a celebrity endorsement, but in this case, the model is unexpected: the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and first and last President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. It would be an amusing choice for a spokesman if it weren’t so troubling.
MIND THE FILM: PHOTOGRAPHS AND FILMS WITH LOST NARRATIVES
Ana Peraica
This essay highlights the enforced reception of documentary genres and in particular, the limitations of documentary filmic and photographic images of war through the implementation of socialistic ideology. We must approach all “historical” documents with skepticism, especially master narratives, and question whether the images have been retouched and/or reinterpreted. Looking at photographs years later, we can grasp which are “historical” fakes—mis-annotated, staged, or retouched photos—by contrasting them to others or even better, to negatives, if they are left behind. This would, of course, mean interpreting images apart from their captions and contexts, provided by editors and publishing companies, as well as finding extra materials to compare them.
NARRATIVES
MEDIA ARTS AND ELEMENTARY-AGE CHILDREN: CREATING ACTIVE PRODUCERS FROM PASSIVE CONSUMERS
Pia Guerrero
In 2004, I worked as the Director of Art and Public Education at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts (EBCPA) in Richmond, California, and was presented with the challenge of developing a media literacy curriculum for local elementary school children. Working with young children was new for me. Most of my experience involved leading media literacy workshops for teachers and teens. The curriculum was part of a larger project called “Learning Without Borders,” which integrated media arts activities into the curriculum and daily life of three local elementary schools with predominantly African American and Latino students. The project also included three distinct subunits of Mexican and African music, dance, and theater arts.
MEDIA LITERACY, MEDIA SERVICE
Jen Saffron
“We’re going to interview the original Freedom Riders,” I announced as we rumbled through Montgomery, Alabama, in a 105-degree van, camera gear stacked in the back. “Don’t screw it up.” This directive barely masked my insecurities as the new video students sat silently in the back.
PEDAGOGY IN ACTION: URBAN IMAGES IN FILM AND MEDIA
Janina Ciezadlo
Distinctions concerning what things are, how we define things, how they appear, and what their appearance tells us about them, are quixotic. In the case of cities, which have long been represented in art, literature, and photographic and electronic media, a second level of complication arises: cities represent themselves. Buildings, plans (both vernacular and grand), and history; marketing for tourism and civic pride; neighborhoods; ethnic, racial, and class identities (among other expressions of style) are ways in which a city produces itself and images of itself simultaneously. Even the theatrical stage with its perspectival backdrop was imported from city streets. Compound these significations, the diverse cluster of popular, cultural, and artistic images that comprise our view of the city with the convergence of disciplines that take cities and the urban process—the complex interactions between natural and built environments and social relations that make up the dynamic course of urban history, economics, politics and everyday lives—as their object, add the complexities of film studies, and one has a challenging subject.
Book Reviews
KIDS TODAY!
Gretchen Schwarz
They are different. They are not a new race of humans, not without the same old issues, frailties, and faults. Digital natives, however, “all born after 1980, when social digital technologies, such as Usenet and bulletin board systems, came online” (1), do communicate in new and different ways, and older adults (mostly “digital immigrants” often puzzled by technology) had better pay attention to them. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives is a useful book for parents, educators, cultural observers, and scholars of communications and technology. With the proliferation of iPods, video games, Facebook, YouTube, and laptops, young people today face new multimedia opportunities and new problems. Adults must become involved in helping youth navigate both the opportunities and the problems.
REMAKING MEDIA
Lucy Mulroney
The history of artists employing language as an artistic medium is the subject of two recent, and very different, books. Stephen Bury’s Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant-Garde 1900– 1937 explores how the historical avant-garde utilized print media as a key mode of artistic production while Liz Kotz’s Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art examines how language, transformed in the wake of new recording media, functioned as a structural and durational template for artists in New York during the 1960s. Together, these books offer a new perspective on the history of artistic practices—a perspective that begs us to think critically and creatively about how language operates within all cultural productions. While neither author is a media studies scholar, their books contribute to a broader discussion about media literacy by making apparent how central the practice of co-opting media formats and messages has been for artists throughout the twentieth century. In fact, if media literacy is generally understood as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in a variety of forms,” then it becomes apparent after reading Bury’s and Kotz’s books that artists have consistently worked not only to access and employ the means of communication available in their cultural milieux, but have often pioneered contemporary media literacy practices by applying strategies of collage, appropriation, and distortion to language; thereby creating alternative modes of exhibition and distribution for their language-based works.
Media Literacy Resources
BORROWED AND REBORN
Julia Bradshaw
Mediated
California Museum of Photography, University of
California
Riverside, C alifornia
January 31–April 4, 2009
“Mediated” at the California Museum of Photography was a blend of single-channel videos and installations by seven artists who drew their inspiration or materials from our mediated culture: movies, TV, internet, and video games. These artists borrowed, re-mixed, and retold scenes from our collective knowledge of moving images, nudging up against definitions of fair use and challenging the cultural context of the original source. Like most appropriation artists, these artists benefited from our familiarity with much of the source material and thus, the approachability of the artworks.
AMERICAN BEAUTY
Martin Patrick
Dan Graham: Beyond
Museum of C ontemporary A rt
Los A ngeles
February 15–May 25, 2009
Dan Graham is one of the artists in the United States that, until comparatively recently, has been least lionized on his home turf, instead serving as a kind of intellectual gadfly/public artist-inexile, representing American art abroad without being either wellintegrated into its canon or at ease with many of its stylistic premises. Graham’s long career and variegated output is thus both paradoxical and problematic. A prolific writer of some of the most fascinating essays by any twentieth-century artist, his texts are characterized by their eclectic and hybrid sensibility, turning from punk rock to European gardens, political unrest to the phenomenology of perception. While this synthetic approach with its hyperkinetic curiosity could easily be considered utterly American, the most recent large retrospectives of Graham’s work have been mounted in locations like Barcelona, Paris, and Vienna—not in the good old U.S. of A.
PARADIGM SHIFT
J. Lynn Fraser
Housepaint, Phase 2: Shelter
Royal O ntario M useum
Toronto
December 13, 2008–July 5, 2009
Homelessness is a cacophony of extreme emotions, financial disrepair, and physical instability. Museums, by their very nature, are the staid solid citizens of any city: placid, enduring, and tradition-bound. At the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a unique partnership is taking place between street artists and the museum to bring attention to the issues surrounding homelessness. “Housepaint, Phase 2: Shelter” recontextualizes street art as a recognizable art form. It also provides a venue for the ROM to reframe itself as a socially relevant institution that can speak to contemporary issues.
Book Reviews
ARTIST AS ARCHIVIST
Travis Nygard & Alec Sonsteby
The Big Archive: Art from
Bureaucracy
By S ven S pieker
MIT P ress, 2008
228 pp./$24.95 (hb)
In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker explores connections between information science and art-making. Many contemporary artists interrogate how ideas are produced, stored, retrieved, and become accepted as true. This was a major theme of Documenta 11, the biennale held in Kassel, Germany, in 2002, curated by Okwui Enwezor. The theme was explored more fully by Enwezor in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (2008), as well as Charles Merewether’s The Archive (2006). The fact that an earlier generation of artists were also interested in these ideas, however, is less well known, and Spieker attempts to rectify this. In his own words: “I contend that the use of archives in late-twentieth-century art reacts in a variety of ways to the assault by the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes on the nineteenth-century objectification (and fetishization) of linear time and historical process” (1). The Big Archive is thus, fundamentally, an attempt to find historical precedents for the art-making of today.
CALL FOR POPULIST PUBLIC ART
Nogin Chung
Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism
By C her Krause Knight
Blackwell P ublishing, 2008
187 pp./$32.95 (sb)
From Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) to Jeff Koons’s Train (scheduled for 2011), from Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1981) to The Gates (2005) by Christo and Jean-Claude, public art has ignited heated discussions sometimes resulting in its removal from the site, its modification, or other arrangements to appease. The answer to the question of why we have incessant controversies over these publicly displayed artworks can be found in the pages of Cher Krause Knight’s Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism. Here Knight refutes the narrow definition of public art as physically located in public space, geographically bound to a site, and open to the public for free. Instead, she endorses populism as a key factor that would make a public artwork more engaging and successful. Negating the derogatory implication of populism, she grants it values and significance based on her understanding of it as “increasing viewer’s agency through proactive choices” (131), and calls for populist, public art. If public art has been under scrutiny mainly because it garners better exposure to non-museum goers or “homogenous philistines” (61), then that very fact offers a new direction and a more inclusive definition of public art. Her implication is that what sparks uproar over public art is its lack of accessibility and community involvement rather than its inappropriate use of public space or funding.
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