Christopher Kennedy

Learning Elsewhere: Digital storytelling and collaborative media production

Posted by Christopher Kennedy, Mar 14, 2014 1 comment


Christopher Kennedy

Christopher Lee Kennedy Christopher Lee Kennedy

In 2003, one woman’s 58-year collection of thrift was rediscovered by her grandson and transformed into a living museum and artist residency program called Elsewhere. Today, we invite artists from all over the world to create site-specific projects that respond to this collection, while working inside a three-story former thrift store in downtown Greensboro, NC. As the building and its contents are continually transformed into an evolving artwork, publics are invited daily to play, collaborate, and curate alongside this changing creative community.

As a teaching artist at Elsewhere, the museum and its vast collections provide a platform for learning projects, workshops, and tours that engage schools and publics across North Carolina. In 2012, we launched CoLab, a collaborative laboratory for youth-led media experiments and digital storytelling. Each CoLab session brings together a teaching artist and a group of youth to explore a theme or question, creating interactive media works that range from short films and live performances, to digital publications, websites, and sound recordings in response.

One of our first collaborations was with artist group Invisible and high school students at Weaver Academy. During a month-long residency at the school, students produced video self-portraits with VHS camcorders, and created sculptures from old TV monitors, VCRs and scrap material used to screen a final video work in one of Greensboro’s public parks. This past fall, students at Dudley High School collaborated with artist Athena Kokoronis to choreograph a dance for Elsewhere’s storefront theater, which was inspired by personal stories, the quilts of Gee’s Bend, and Trisha Brown’s performative line drawings. And in the spring we’ll be continuing a project called I Don’t Do Boxes, a digital magazine for and by LGBTQ-identifying youth in the southeast.

In each project, Elsewhere’s archive of material histories and community of artists provide a context to experiment with education. Our aim is to cultivate curiosity through play and storytelling, while exploring contemporary art concepts and collaborative media production. Although each project is developed with some loose structure, CoLabs inevitably veer off into unknown territory. Sometimes things don’t work out—a video camera stops working, something is too conceptual, or the group doesn’t understand how this could be considered “art”.

While these moments of confusion present challenges, they also offer a space to confront an expectation of what art is and what it can be. I’ve seen this unfold many times. Typically in the first week of meeting the group, a teaching artist realizes students have been schooled to understand art in a particular way—as a painting, a sculpture, or fine art practice. When presented with the idea that art can draw from our everyday experience and popular cultures, they aren’t just confused, but often frightened.

Moving beyond these assumptions takes time and a willingness to experiment. Often a visit to Elsewhere’s museum offers a space to reflect and bear witness to art as something different –an assemblage of things, concepts, and people in a state of flux. After the group has had a shared experience with art in this way, something new begins to emerge, a re-imagined kind of media literacy that is not just concerned with critique but also imaginative possibility.

Students begin to understand that we create and experiment with media all the time. Our mobile devices, Facebook statuses, Twitter feeds, and Tumblr blogs are not just an individual form of expression, they are also the language of a new communication society. While it’s easy to find ourselves inundated with this ceaseless flux of images and information, we can also understand this “socialized media” as a living archive. A research in process that can become the source material for creative interventions, playful parodies, and a new kind of storytelling that brings together the ideals of critical pedagogy with the ecstatic experience of art and cultural production.

Of course, we must tread cautiously. While digital storytelling projects seek to democratize media by empowering youth to share their voice, these projects can also reify identity-based assumptions and stereotypes as well. In this delicate exchange, teaching artists must recognize their own power and privilege, and realize issues of identity and difference can never be fully unpacked in a neatly arranged month-long youth media project, but rather we can only hope more questions and inquiries are raised. The role of the teaching artist in this sense is to open what Maxine Greene calls “a space of possibility” for imaginative discourse, a confrontation that is ongoing and unfinished.

Now, after four years of organizing projects at Elsewhere, I’ve learned media is not something for us to merely consume. It is a space for us to play with, to critique, and experiment within and around. It is a living artifact; a changing and dynamic story that is always being retold. Youth are the perfect collaborators and storytellers because they see the world as a layered tapestry of possibilities and even more questions, still. In providing a space to celebrate curiosity, CoLab aims to model an approach to media production that is open-ended and sourced directly from the stories and popular cultures of youth.

At Elsewhere, we believe things tell stories. From this simple premise much is possible, but only if we expand our idea of who, what, and where these stories can be told and how they are shared.

1 responses for Learning Elsewhere: Digital storytelling and collaborative media production

Comments

August 01, 2014 at 8:20 am

I enjoyed reading this blog post, its nice to see people appreciate media production and get involved init especially the youth.

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