I've been so excited for this class. In the last few years of working with data and communicating data, it's become apparent to me how important it is to present them in a story. And this class is all about story; in the first class we were presented with the questions:
"How does tech change the way we tell stories?"
"Why do we tell stories?"
"What makes a story a story?"
I jotted down some of the discussion and two points stood out to me:
- story vs. fact vs. data and how do we differentiate them
- A story has conflict that is resolved by the end
The second point I'm not sure if I agree with. I've seen plenty of movies (mostly Japanese slice of life) that has 0 conflict, there's no hero's journey, and it's just us getting a view into the main character's life. There's no distinct beginning or end, and some might consider it mundane, but I find it beautiful. I'm not sure how that fits into (perhaps primarily Western?) connotation of a story, and I'm not sure how it'll fit into this class.
Because our first assignment is to tell a story with sound, we were also presented with many examples of sound artists during class. The artist that I really liked was Celeste Boursier-Mougenot whose clinamen v.3 I saw at SFMOMA a few years back. It left a really deep impression, I loved that it was conceptually so straightforward but the sounds it made were rich and beautiful. We also saw another work by Boursier-Mougenot called From Here to Ear, where music was created by a flock of birds interacting with electronic guitars. In both of these examples, the installations are never the same again—and I love that novelty, that there's something interacting with the work (water currents, birds) such that I can go back over and over and experience something new.
I've always been much more of a visual person and not so good with audio (I'm extremely tone deaf, I played 3 different instruments as a kid trying to get better at music before giving up, etc.) so I had thought I'd never really be able to do any sound-related art. But it was so awesome to learn about all of these sound artists whose work I didn't feel intimidated by, that I felt even as a tone-deaf, musically ungifted person I could connect to.
Readings
In the first half of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, "The danger of a single story", she talks about how we often only know of one perspective of something or someone different from us, a single story. This reminds me of all the ways we try to put each other "in a box", not out of malice, but because it's easier on our cognitive load if we can put other complex, human beings into one neat, single category. Much less to remember. So we have to introduce ourselves with a job title, a company we work at, or a school we go to. Anything beyond that is details and noise.
But like Adichie explains in the second half of her talk, stories are power and they indicate a balance of power. America as a cultural and economic power have many stories that people around the world know, many other countries, not so much. It reminds me of conversations I've had about race, about how as an Asian-American, I have grown up within a narrowly defined box of who I'm supposed to be. But there are so many of us now trying and succeeding in breaking out of that box. (But is that because we have been "allowed" to by the machine that is American capitalism, or because we truly have?)
I had a harder time formulating thoughts to Cassie Brighter's response, "Trans Women And The Danger of a Single Story — Where Chimamanda Got It Wrong". Whereas I could relate to Adichie's points about being flattened to just one story because of my race and gender, my sexual identity is part of the majority. I am guilty of not having read as much or thought as much about the experiences of transgender people, and I have been—as Brighter pointed out—blind because of my privilege.
I appreciated Brighter calling out Adichie's painting of transgender women as having been afforded the privleges of a man before their transition as a shallow, single story. That even though there are stories of trans women who, Brighter included, did live for many years in the world as a man (but at great psychological expense), there are also many who were abused and bullied for acting too "sissy" and not fulfilling their gender roles. I found Brighter's final call (demand) powerful, where she added one single word to a quotation from Adichie's TED talk:
“Culture doesn't make people. People make culture. So if it is true that the full humanity of [trans] women is not part of our culture, then we must make it part of our culture.”
What these readings have taught me is that it may be hard to go beyond a shallow, single story for people whose lived experiences are different from my own, and even harder to acknowledge those with problems I've never been affected by and thus never had to think consider. But—especially when designing experiences for human beings—it is extremely important to do our best to pursue those multiple stories and fill our blind spots.
A sound vacation
Our first assignment is to create a "sound vacation", an experience that can "transport us to another location" in 1–2 minutes. To get familiar with the equipment, we went around the ITP floor with a Zoom Audio Recorder with a challenge to record five different sounds that each evoke a different emotion. We were given a list of words, and we decided to go with: delicate, joyful, liquid, soft, and rythmic.
My favorites are delicate:
And liquid:
Both very ASMR, but liquid especially (and it tells the whole story of washing hands haha).
Something experimental
For the actual assignment, I was partnered with Jingjing and encouraged to be experimental.
I wanted to leverage my data background, so I racked my brain and came up with an idea—perhaps a little bit out there, perhaps not 100% fitting the brief, but definitely experimental.
Instead of creating one cohesive story, I wondered about a more...literal? approach and look at videos we recorded on vacations through the years. We'd choose a few (preferably from different cities and countries), map their locations on a globe, then superimpose that map of the world onto a map of Brooklyn. Then we'd go to those actual locations in Brooklyn and record snippets there, and edit all those clips together.
Thankfully, Jingjing loved the idea when I presented it to her (grateful she didn't find it weird or too out there), and we agreed to select three vacation videos each. We thought it was especially poetic that us both being new to Brooklyn (her from China, me from SF), we could use our past vacations as a springboard to explore and familiarize ourselves with our new city.
Fingers crossed that the result sounds presentable, instead of jarring!