Given my love of metaphor, juxtaposibility, and “mappingness” (to say nothing of my love of oddball neologisms), I have to report on a particularly intriguing juxtaposition I found for my talk at the 2008 CHEMA meeting in Louisville last week. As I was finishing my prep for the talk, I’d pretty much settled on beginning with the Big Bang of Michael Wesch’s “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Michael describes his creation as “Web 2.0 in Five Minutes,” and the five-million-plus views on YouTube testify to its power and clarity. What better way to start? Then it occurred to me that Robbie Dingo’s beautiful “Watch The World” would make a dramatic and poignant followup to Michael’s piece. If, as Michael suggests, the machine is us (and I agree with him totally, by the way), Robbie Dingo’s creation offers a stunning example of new modes of artistic expression and discursive reasoning available to us by way of our machines. Of course, Michael’s piece is itself a work of art as well, something that’s even more obvious when one watches Michael’s and Robbie’s works back to back.
I admit that I was also looking for an affective continuum here–aiming to present varieties of wonder acting on the heart and mind in different but complementary ways.
In any event, the juxtaposition was revelatory for me, and I think it worked pretty well for the audience too. Try it when you get a moment. First Wesch, then Dingo. Then take a moment for optimism, hard-won but necessary, about humanity at its best.
I used Wesch’s Machine is Us/ing US and Dingo’s video at a workshop for 60 local K-12 teachers late last summer. Only 1 person had seen either of them, in part because their school systems blocked access to YouTube (I knew this and had to download to my computer in advance to present there). I talked with them about how they could do the same from their home computers. [I’m optimistic about teachers’ desire to find ways to get good materials to their students, but wow, couldn’t we make their jobs a little easier?]
I didn’t show the clips back-to-back, however. It makes Wesch’s message even more powerful, and provides another layer to reactions to Dingo that goes beyond, “Hey, isn’t that cool?”
That’s very interesting. Coincidentally, on the wall directly behind my laptop screen is a print of “Starry Night.”
I found this to be rather interesting as well: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/06/02/080602crat_atlarge_rosen
@Jeff: Don’t get me started on the whole blocking access strategy. Amazing what kind of messages we’re sending young learners, and the roadblocks we put in place for already beleaguered teachers. Regarding your last paragraph’s observation: Precisely!
@Emily: Great coincidence, and an even greater gift in that URL. My new NYer hasn’t come yet, so I hadn’t read that article. Wow. One of the best overviews of Milton I’ve read, and it comes to his defense in stirring fashion. When I wrote my dissertation, stuff like this was very hard to find. I’m thrilled that critical judgments of Milton’s accomplishment have become more complex and nuanced than they once were. And the book he cites on Moral Education–hey, I know that author! Cool to see her praised in there.