EXCHANGES: CULTURE, PLACE, IDENTITY, MEMORY
Ellen Mcmahon

This project has been done many times in various forms as it is continually being modified and refined. The point of the project is to give students a better understanding of how their particular cultural and personal experiences mold their perspectives, create your sense of identity and influence the way they make and interpret visual material. The project begins with students selecting both a location and an event, activity or phenomenon that relates to their sense of personal or group identity. Then they create a list of descriptive words, take photographs from their word lists, conduct research and write text relating to their topic. Some students research their ethnic and racial origins, and explore the traditions and oral histories of their families and communities. Others focus on the minutiae of their daily lives. In all cases students reflect on events in their pasts and connect their particular experience with the choices they make as creators and interpreters of visual material. Translation of Research into Visuals Form-- The materials generated in the research stage are used to design a set of postcards that are mailed to exchange partners. Through discussions of semiotic and rhetoric theory students learn ways to avoid relying on direct literal narratives. As they translate meaningful personal experience into visual form, for a specific audience, they often experience frustration with the limitations of the process. They notice that some of the nuance and complexity of their message is inevitably lost, trivialized and oversimplified as it becomes visual. The awareness of this problem, inherent in any act of representation makes them more sensitive to some of the difficult issues in design today like stereotyping, appropriation and commodification of ethnic imagery. A majority of the students from the Arizona class, which is relatively homogeneous, focused on day-to-day personal concerns which inevitably connected to larger cultural issues. One student used her elderly parents' recent move to a retirement community to reflect on her own fear of aging and death. Another student produced a humorous series addressing the necessary comfort of auditory isolation provided by his perpetual use of earphones. (These cards were constructed using tabs and pop-ups which required the user to physically push the subject out of the way to read the text.) Another student layered six translucent cards so that when the receiver peeled them apart they would experience the process (and consider the possibility) of the brain fabricating the "memory" of an event that never happened. Based on a recent personal experience, he produced a compelling psychological piece about his relationship to his own thought processes. The class in Hawaii reflects the culturally heterogeneous population of the island. The cards produced in that class focused on issues that revealed the ethnic and racial tensions of the present and traced the cultural assimilations and socio-political histories of the various groups. One student who named her series of cards, "One Body, Two Cultures", dealt with the dichotomy of her experience of being both American and Korean. She combined photographs of single items, usually found in pairs, (sock, shoe, ear, eye) with dotted outlines to indicate the missing half. When the series of cards was put in order, large text fragments on the back of the cards combined to read, "the whole is greater that the sum of it's parts." Another student explored perceptions about the relationship between Hawaii and the mainland from economic, social, and cultural perspectives through the juxtaposition of images and text (a photograph of a pineapple with the word "American", the Liberty Bell with the word "foreign"). One of her cards reads M_ __ORITY . The receiver mentally fills in the blanks with "I N" or "A J" and can't help but notice the similarities in the two words, "minority" and "majority", and which word came to mind first. Interpretations, Analysis and Writing--Each student writes a formal interpretation to be sent to the designer of the cards they received. For the most part, the interpretations are thoughtful and carefully written with an awareness of the mutuality of the process between the exchange partners. The geographic distance and unfamiliarity between the students contributes to a directness that differs from traditional peer class critiques. Interpretations are followed by e-mail responses and discussions about design and cultural issues on a list serve. This semester we concluded the exchange with a video-conference between the classes. Peer Response --Exchanges becomes a complex web of interrelationships and as students simultaneously give and receive direct feedback they learn firsthand about the instability of signs as they travel from maker to receiver across geographic, cultural, and individual boundaries. In one set of cards a student from Hawaii transcribed writing and drawing from a men's bathroom stall.Ê Her intent was to use the signs she found to communicate notions of public and private space. However as a heterosexual female she failed to address the homoerotic content of the source material. The student who received the cards was a gay man who focused his analysis around this oversight. The cards provided a springboard for the receiver to learn more about the visual expression of his own specific cultural group, that went beyond the intent of the designer.

 

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