December 19, 2006
The fridge may seem as if it is just an appliance to keep your stuff cold; but actually in many homes the fridge is the place where domestic acts are played out, displayed and negotiated. The fridge door is a text where multimodal communicative acts take place and is an expression of life in a partcular household.
I am not just talking about the way we leave food stains on the handle, or where milk seeps out and round the rubber seal. I am talkng about magnetic poetry; I am talking about postcards blu-tacked on the sides; I am talking about post-it notes as reminders; and I am talking about the way members of households use fridge doors as boards for creative expression.
The fridge door in my house changes over time; we all seem to contribute to the changes. And the things around and on the fridge seem part of the display….
We improvise around the fridge. The latest addition is the ‘grape text’. I discovered it this morning when I came downstairs to make breakfast; it was the trace of my nocturnal daughter who was clearly in a good mood last night, feeling frivolous, when the rest of us were in bed, wanting to make us laugh while we were up and about in the day and in her absence (when she slept till 2p.m.)
The grape text is surrounded by other people’s jokes, and holiday mementoes. I know we are not alone as there is a flickr group here showing that other people do this stuff too.
October 11, 2006
So.
Here is a thing from YouTube, showing Judith Supine at work on the streets of New York.
In this instance Supine uses found texts to produce something new; the art process consists of a reconstitution of the found texts which is then processed digitally and then put straight back on the streets. It is a kind of re-arrangement of the environment to make you sit up and notice. And the use of commercial art in this way is ironic; cutting up the magazines, transforming the beautiful models into something ghoulish, staring out from the walls at passers by.
Here is some stuff from MOO. If you are a member of Flickr then YOU TOO can get cards made with your own images. I used a big mix of images to see what I would like best and then plan to order some more of the ones I really like.
Today’s post has been about how we can use and re-use texts to make new ones with new meanings. I have become very interested in the idea of PROVENANCE; the way texts collect additional meanings from the journeys they have made and the associations they have picked up from being in other contexts.
More from Judith:
October 8, 2006
Yep, that’s $1.6 BILLION!
For a company that has been going for 10 months and hasn’t made a profit
“YouTube figured out what Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and all the others in the marketplace didn’t,” she said. “It’s not about the video. It’s about creating a community around the video.”
Well so there you have it… social networking is THE thing … and just to think, it was in 2003 that I wrote my article about tweenies online,I ended it by saying:
The girls who use the web sites in order to communicate with others are using roles
to express themselves in a range of ways; sometimes speaking as ‘themselves’ and
sometimes as mothers or as employers (etc). Their interaction is both public and
private, conformist and rebellious and forms just a small segment of a much longer
international, historical conversation where women and girls continue to grapple with
a range of definitions of what it means to be feminine. In doing so, they form crucial
links with each other and seek above all, to stay in contact.
The article is ‘Negotiating Femininities Online’ in Gender and Education Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2004.
I am quite pleased with this as I wrote it before people were talking of Web 2.0 and ’social networking’. (It took 2 years for them to publish it as one reviewer kept it for more than a year!!)
October 3, 2006
A whole generation (and more) of kids look at their hands like this … a lot.
they know how to hold and control the console; they learn to be dextrous - in the same way that I learned to be dextrous with a pencil, then a pen when I learned to write.
When I watch my son I see he looks at the screen and instinctively moves his hands, reacting so that he changes the on-screen text, making it do what he wants it to do, without thinking about the mechanical process of moving his hands (as I do when I write.)
This hand position links game players into texts in a way that I have never yet experienced.
I have not given the hours of time that my son has, to becoming accomplished at interacting with digital narratives which invite his participation.
My son often derides the stories in the games he plays but finds other things to enjoy beyond repetitive plot or shallow character (often in the games he plays). He enjoys the escapism, the thrill of the chase, the ability to replay exciting moments that he influenced, and to ‘drive’ a car impossibly fast, using skills he has acquired, over hours (in fact days and weeks) of practice.
This litle hand set allows players to move through texts in multiple ways, reading complex screens, assimilaing information that is useful not just for that game, but for countless others.
He reads the images, the charts on screen (how much energy has he eft? What weapons as he got? etc.) and can also read or hear dialogue. These screen based digital texts require full engagement of te mind and body.
Can kids of today concentrate on something for more than a few minutes at a time? You bet.
Just motivate them.
July 10, 2006
Frankly at the United Kingdom Literacy Conference at Nottingham University last week, I was bowled over by Naomi Hamer’s talk on tweenie girls’ books (and stuff).
It was great, Naomi is doing really exciting stuff, loking at the way in which popular fiction texts aimed at tweenie girls are increasingly merging a range of text types within their covers. However the stories move beyond the pages and into merchandising on a grand scale so that the fiction on the pages moves seamlessly in and out of the books onto screen, web pages, consul games, cell phones and more. So the stories move out into other text types, but different text types are also within the pages so that we see chat rooms represented; collages of all kinds. She referred to ‘fluidity’ and the ‘blurring of of lines’ across and between texts and back again.
Naom was slick and fast in her delivery and so confident of her data and theory … it was wonderful. And I want to think some more about all of this … which linked in fact with the work DrKate reported on from her Barnsley creative arts work with artists and schools. But it also takes in the notion of artefacts as text. (Something I have also witnessed and even taken part in on Flickr.)
I have found the wonderful Clarice Bean site here and you can buy MARVELLOUS stuff here. (I like the accessories best.)
I am afraid Guy was a bit immature and tried to steal Naomi’s book from her.
(Sadly, that kind of behaviour can spoil it for everybody else.)
Now just before I go now … here is the wonderful Vic:
She looks like a filmstar.
June 2, 2006
You have heard of web 2.0.
Now, is the debut of the next big thing…
So here is a film, of Jesus 2.0 in the making and of its journey to, and installation onto, the streets.
The on street installation was just one part of the production process for in the link , we see not just the art artefacts, but also another piece of art - a video, with music and words.This video production gives additional meanings to the artefact; the video shows the art as a whole process, not just as being the final product. But further meanings surround the artefact, via the video. The video looks low budget and that gives the whole artistic process and product a kind of ‘rough around the edges’ feel to it. It gives it the feel of urban guerilla; of being made quickly in a confined space on meagre resources. All these things ADD to the meaning - the semiotic process. The fact it is on a web site; a web site that is not advertised officially but whose link is passed around the web, blog to blog. (I got it from TT who got it from Gammablog’s Flickr stream). Makes it all feel covert, exciting.
Much of the graffitti I photographed in NYC last month was pasted in and around Wooster Street. (Like this one:)
Turns out there is a Wooster Street Collective - and they also are experimenting with the modality of their work. Moving it to a range of media inorder to give it a wider audience. This blog gives an off street showcase for the pieces; it also reports on a book publication, and even an exhibition tour.
Is ’street art’ moving off the street? Is it now best known as ‘urban communication?’ And what does that mean?
is that why this site refers to ‘urban communication?’
And is this my new research area?
Funky business.
May 26, 2006
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:
*Multimodality is the combination of different kinds of modes—visual, written, oral, spatial, etc.—in a text’s content and design. Kress (1997) describes modes as the stuff we use to make texts. I like to think of it as a combination of elements that create the ethos of a text. For example: an advertisement that uses a combination of font, colour, illustration, and words to send a certain message—this mixing and melding of modalities represents multimodality. Multimodality can be seen in every text and has shifted how children engage with literacy. Students no longer simply decode, skim, and scan, but they move across and among texts, design texts, create mark-up code, render images, and so on. Where students formerly understood the layout of pages in a book, today they read, design, surf, and write on-screen. We see multimodality in popular media, in animated texts, and in the kinds of texts students make at school and at home. As educators, we should not only understand and use these modern texts, but also come to understand their place within our classrooms.
