DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

OK so here is an interesting thing. It is from here.

So it is an image; it is sewing - a patchwork; it is written text; it is poetry; it is a wall hanging; it is a picture in Flickr; it is on a blog. Very multi layered. It is a muliti modal text.

I joined this group on classroom displays about eighteen months ago and it only had about twelve pictures for a-a-a-a–ages. Now it has a healthy 268 - and a blog and some good discussions. A sign of the times, because Flickr now has in excess of two million members. It is hardly a surprise that teachers are using it to network.

It turns out there are so many groups for teachers on Flickr and quite a few of the groups have associated blogs.

This one (of course) appeals to me - the New York City Writing Project. If you look in the discussion forums you will see they meet in real space and are really getting to support each other in exciting work. Fab.

David farmer’s drama blog gives this useful link today to a FREE BOOK about blogging.

Like ‘Anon’, I have done two posts today.

By the way …. referring to my title of this post …. This is how Jennifer defines multimodality:

New York is waiting to be snapped up. (By us with our cameras, and by the property developers with their diggers.)

I am unable to make any sense of all the photos I have been taking and to write about the people is going to take a-a-a-a-ages.

This IS fun though.

I am a Flickr activist trying to free the sugar dudes today. You just wait and see!

A few days ago I was a Flickr activist entering areas on the shores of Manhattan where controversial devlopments are taking place.

Nice slideshow of the day here.

I am being educated about street artists such as Swoon and Celso and I will write properly on all this later.
It all needs to settle into my cerbral cortex before I can arrange a narrative.

But there is so much to say about Flickr and online offline affinities and tiers of association.
How is it that we have managed evrytime to meet people from Flickr who are just like us? Who we love to be with and conect with so well? How did we learn these skills? (So much here on cultural capital and social know-how.) We have met people for the first time who we feel we already know. This is fabulous.

Importantly I have bought handmade Cowboy boots (ha ha ludicrously marvellous to wear when listening to Laura Cantrell etc.) ; jeans and t-shirt from Gap; presents from MoMA; bag for son; so much so much. So much more.
Love it here.

Yesterday evening I was, as we used to say at my school, ‘Cream Crackered’. However, I was persuaded (really cajoled) into going to the Sharrow Lantern Festival that had by then been postponed three times due to rain. This is last year’s festival.

As usual TT was right (well not really, ‘as usual’ but I am trying to be kind) and we had a really nice evening. We had to wait around a bit for the parade to begin, don’t know why, maybe to wait till it got dark. But is was sweet to see people arriving with their precious lanterns, and a bit of fun to follow the parade around the streets (led by some mystery people wearing weird clothes and playing drums).

This kind of event makes me feel nostalgic, but I have no idea why as it is of a type that certainly never happened when I was a kid. For me, these community affairs are new fangled; as are lights, lanterns and costumes. Perhaps it reminds me of being in school plays, but those tended to be boring, because as a ‘good reader’ I always seemed to be the flaming narrator.

It was nice watching the people arrive anyway, just seeing everyone excited about it all…. some people might say it was marvellous that we were not all stuck at home watching the box. Or doing stuff on the Internet.
But of course I would not have known about it without the Internet as it was through Sheffield Flickr that I heard of it at all … and of course we met people from Sheffield Flickr group there. Then went back home and uploaded photos for all the other people to see.

My dear son Miles came with us which was nice. And I see Guy went too. More photos here.

And just to keep you informed, TT has left for Sydney today and hopes to meet Anya. Wish I was going too.

At the weekend I went to two Flickr meets.

Firstly met Moufle from NYC who came into London; she was joined by Bingo Little and .danimal from Bristol, as well as .Danny from Cambridge. Quite a brigade . We had lunch in Bloomsbury and took a little walk down to Shoreditch where we went to the Eagle on City Road. (See its mention in this nursery rhyme here.)
There we met the London Flickr group and did half their walk with them. (We left early as had to do other stuff).
It was grand to meet people and cemented the idea that while it is great to communicate on a global scale there is never anythung quite so humane as being in aface to face situation.
On Sunday we had our own Sheffield Flickrmeet in The Showroom. It ws our fourth meeting and a couple of new people came along which is good. We voted on the winer of the Cathedral shot competition and have set up a series of new projects. We are also planning an exhibition of our work and want to show it somewhere central. Bristol have done something similar. It is interesting again that while we enjoy the mixing on a global scale we relish the idea of meeting new people in our locality … all people we would never otherwise have come into conatct with. Fascinating. (However there are those who do NOT come to the meets and so we cannot run far with that idea.)

And finally, in checking out arrangements for when we go to NYC in a couple of weeks, we found that the New York group is using Wayfarer to show aspects of their city as they see it. I love this idea of bringing a personal perspective on the maps available and labelling the world in this manner. You add a photo and a description to a wayfarer map. This is Niznoz’s work .. must have taken him ages. (Small world, Niznoz is Moufle’s cousin.) TT also had a go here.

We have come a long way since the ol metaphysicals drew up maps and discovered the world was round .. but that really was quite a discovery!

Here is Moufle:

and here are TT and Little Bingo (thankfully in the controlled zone):

Oh yes. One more thing … I got chucked out of a Flickr group today … have yet to discover why. Now I am over the trauma (do I look like I care?) I am amused by all this and must consult Iona and Peter to check out why some kids on the playground feel compelled to set up rules so that they have hardly anyone left to play with… (the group has gone down to only 8 members now - from loads and loads)

From Tampen we have familiar looking exotic images:

The images are ones I would expect to be able to see in many locations in my home town.

While the exotic exotic images today come from Rigamarole:

I would not expect to be able to see these scenes anywhere in the UK.

So the first two, taken by Tampen of his daughter, show me somethng from my everyday world but with the feel of the exotic - they are richly semiotic. And the second two photos show us Rigmarole’s images from Bombay. These are sights which belong to ‘other people’s’ everyday experiences and are probably mundane to them, but unfamiliar to me. I think that both the pairs of photos show us images which are ’strongly cultural’; they seem more heavily saturated with semiotic stuff than many other images from the same culture may have been. They tell me all sorts of things about how life goes on, values etc. That is to say the images say so many things about the culture from which they come and I think that this is why I find both pairs very powerful.

I like the way I can see such a rich cultural mix of images on Flickr, and looking at the images side by side like this, we can see the primitive roots of aspects of western fashion. Photographs from less technologically advanced countries are the ones which seem the most exotic and ‘othered’ on Flickr however. i think this must be because they are mainly (but not exclusively) brought to Flickr by people from technologically advanced cultures. This is ‘the norm’ of the Flickr perspective.

for a really great day.
What a line up of wonderful researchers and practitioners.
Here are photos ..

Firstly here are some of the contributors to Kate and Jennifer’s new book. We are:
Gunther Kress, Barbara Comber, Hilary Janks, Jennifer Rowsell, Kate Pahl, Julia Davies and Pippa Stein.

Jennifer and Kate were our wonderful editors:

And the day today was not only a book launch but a showcase for excellent research arsing from Creative Partnerships locally and excellent practice globally. See here, here and here.

You may be interested to know I have been writing this post whilst having the multimodal experience of listening to a Flickr podcast from New York: from here. Fabulous - they have a documentary, interviews, pictures from NYC and a map of the tour they made whilst recordeing the broadcast.
TT was very excited as Star not Star was mentioned - a group he set up aaaages ago. And our friend moufle was on.