Winged Migration: Building Taxonomies for Children

Let’s start with children’s picture books. In class we went through a picture book meant for children which on each page had a thematically sorted conglomerate of illustrated images and their correct English label. The book is meant to be non-fiction, a visual tool for parents to teach young children the kind of vocabularies that a young, Christian, American person might need as they are learning to communicate. While this particular one was an older publication, hundreds of these types of picture books exist on various basic topics a kid might want in order to flesh out his or her vocabulary. Media as a tool for giving kids the tools of classification is incredibly important, and books are a really effective tool, because they usually require an adult’s accompaniment to engage with the child, which studies show is the best way to learn. However, I suggest that books like these are the very basic building block of a child’s taxonomy. Children’s media must be able to not only provide image/word associations, but present the observable world in action in a way that books can’t, and without simple illustrations and labels, give kids further valuable information about a particular subject. Moving image is the most effective tool for this kind of learning, and it is best demonstrated in observational documentaries such as Winged Migration (2001).

Winged Migration is a 90 minute documentary that follows the migrations of several different bird species from every continent over the course of 3 years. This documentary puts birds first and humans second with minimal human involvement, and narration is used sparingly. If you’re of the belief that the attention of kids can only be held by fast, colorful animations, than this might not at first seem like a film intended as “children’s media.” In my experience with children, their interest might be piqued by anything, so why not a film that is mostly shots of birds flying. This kind of film meets the needs of inquiry and curiosity, providing kids with a taxonomy of not only birds, but famous landmarks, geography, biomes, climates, food chains, and natural disasters. Most kids will not get a chance to see an avalanche in their young lives, but Winged Migration shows one occurring in nature. The focus of this documentary might not be avalanches, climates, or the statue of liberty, but by following the patterns and behaviors of birds, migratory creatures, they are able to see these things in context. Context is the key here that separates observational documentaries like this from the classification picture books. A picture book might be able to show basic features of a duck and label it as such, but the nature film allows for more inquiry and inference. “Look this is a duck. The duck swims, flies, grooms, communicates, and even fights sometimes.”

Children learn human behavior in their homes. They interact with their parents and siblings and watch plenty of shows about other children. Things like play, communication, and basic needs are picked up by the day to day necessities of being a young person. However, if this is all a child is exposed to, their world is small and human-centric. Winged Migration is the antithesis to it. It’s large, expansive, and rejects humancentrism. Through the documentation of birds and nature, children can learn through observation about diversity, natural environments, and understand the similarities and differences of all living things. While Winged Migration is quite educational, it also reads as spiritual. The music contributes to this of course with chamber choir music, but it is also interested in the transcendental qualities of nature, qualities that are capable of transfixing children and contributing to both their secular and spiritual inquiries and growth.

Narrative and Gaming

I appreciated how thorough Juul is in his argument that video games and narratives are separate entities although games can have narrative components. I found that as I came up with a counter argument, he addresses it without completely dismissing it. I have particularly been of the mindset that narrative is separate from any sort of medium, and that the author can chose to have narrative as its dominant or not and the spectator can also chose to interpret it from a narrative standpoint or not. However, Juul argues that the nature of traditional story telling formats is narrative, and the nature of gaming is interactive and therefore not interpretive dominant. This encouraged me to understand narrative in a new way: as something that is created and fixed. Narratives have specific components and qualities that are observable: existants, locale, agents, diagetic/non-diagetic, resolution, etc. What is usually the interpretive part is theme, moral, message, tone, meaning, etc. In stories and films, the formal elements are fixed although we have all the room in the world to interpret them. In video games, the formal elements are fixed in that the possible options are generated before hand either by design or algorithm, but what is not fixed is the structure, the order, the options the players will choose. By adding that agency, video games open up formal elements in the way that thematic elements are open in traditional narrative in that the player/spectator is necessary in determining them.

With this in mind, here is my example from new media on how this operates: how the user can determine formal elements in such a way that is not possible in traditional narrative mediums.

This is a video game adapted from a book, which is interesting in terms of the narrative argument. You glean pieces of the book as you play the game, but ultimately the experience of living at Walden Pond is in your hands.

Inquiry

This week as we explored the topic of inquiry and watched They Might Be Giant’s music video anthology Here Comes Science, I questioned the effectiveness of children’s media such as this at actually educating children with scientific principles. The lyrics and accompanied animations aim at simplifying scientific facts and making them accessible and fun. However, while the music was energetic and exciting, it wasn’t always the clearest explanation of the thing. For example, in one song the band sings the names of planets and other space objects, not clarifying the difference or what exactly it is they are identifying. In another song they claim the sun to be made of gasses, but then correct themselves in a follow up song claiming the sun is made up of plasma. But what is plasma?

Which brings me to the topic of this week, which isn’t “information” or “education” or “precise answers for children,” it’s inquiry. Here Comes Science seems to leave its audience with more questions than answers, and I think that’s kind of the point. Media such as TMBG’s album, address very basic ideas in science that serve as a kid’s gateway drug into science. Children’s media that serves an educational purpose tends to foster an interest in the subject rather than quickly fill kids’ heads with all the information. These music videos address various areas of scientific inquiry and presents them in bite-sized bits (most songs are less than two minutes long) in order to give kids a taste to pique their curiosity. If this is indeed the purpose, then the simplistic aesthetic of the music videos make sense. The band sticks to primary color schemes, simple shapes, and animations that match sound cues to make their topics as accessible and exciting for kids as possible.

This aesthetic contrasts with the complex, detailed style of Cathedral. If Here Comes Science is the gateway drug, then something like Cathedral is the hardcore stuff. It’s more interested in answering questions, providing deeper knowledge on a subject, hence the aesthetic of the detailed black and white line drawings. Something like Here Comes Science might introduce children to something, whereas something like Cathedral is where they would go to better understand their interest.

The educational style of Here Comes Science assumes that children trust what they are told, rather than needing to always see it for themselves. If children are in fact truly learning science from these dudes in a band that they can’t even see or verify the credentials of, there is something about how kids learn that goes beyond empirical evidence. In fact, this article from the Child Development journal explores the idea that how children think about science is a lot similar to how we tend to think about religion. “Children appear to conceptualize unobservable scientific and religious entities similarly,” the writers argue. They rely on the testimonies of adults to understand the unobservable world, which is perhaps why a large portion of children’s media is dedicated to teaching moral, scientific, and religious principles.

Morality in Pinocchio: Bridging the Gap Between Childhood and Adulthood

Teaching morality to children is kind of like explaining that the earth is round to people in 1000 BC. We are convinced we are right based on fact and experience, but they haven’t figured it out for themselves, so being didactic might not be the best approach. The lessons I gleaned from this week’s viewing of Pinocchio have little to do with the cut and dry messages intended for children. Instead, I learned a lot from the character of Geppetto, from the choices in animation, and I learned a lot about ignorance.

There is a trope in children’s media that often empowers children by making the adults seem stupid, clumsy, and goofy. The children in these stories know better and can often outsmart the adults. Instead of dividing child and adult, we need to be bridging that gap, and I think that the relationship between Geppetto and Pinocchio does this. Before his wish, Geppetto is a kind and nurturing caretaker. He loves his cat and his fish, and he is a masterful creator: giving attention and detail to each of his wooden creations of which there are hundreds.

Geppetto is full of love, and his wish isn’t riches or glory, but rather another soul to look after. He wishes to be a father, and because of his pure intentions, he is granted his wish. Geppetto’s unconditional love is almost childlike, which bridges the gap between child and adult. He isn’t ignorant or clumsy, but rather he embraces the aspects of childhood that Christ asks us to embrace: meekness, simplicity, the ease to love and forgive, and joy.

While Geppetto embraces the virtues of childhood, he has also learned the balance of maturity. Pinocchio’s sin that causes the conflict in the film is ignorance: he is new to existence and like Adam and Eve, is unaware of consequence and must make mistakes in order to progress. Pinocchio has not yet learned the difference between what is good for him and what is not so good, and he is easily persuaded by the snakes of the world. But when he gets in trouble and is taken away from his home, he with the help of his “conscience” Jiminy Cricket can only do so much to save himself. He is able to escape Pleasure Island only when he understands the consequences of his action, and through his mistakes he is able to shed the ignorance of childhood. As he sheds this ignorance the gap between child and adult is further narrowed. His ultimate redemption is when he seeks out Geppetto (it should be clear now that Geppetto is a Christ figure in this narrative) and they are able to escape the stomach of the whale and they receive their ultimate desire: for Pinocchio to become a real boy.

There are some obvious parallels to Christianity in this morality tale, which is interesting to me because a very preliminary reading of this film was that it is a simple black and white right versus wrong story. But if at it’s core is a Christian allegory, how can it be so black and white, when human morality goes beyond Christianity? Perhaps it seems straightforward for a WASP audience, but I am glad that children’s morality tales, while still stemming from traditions such as the wolf narrative, are showing signs of more nuance for a contemporary audience born in an age of diversity, moral relativism, and new technologies. This weekend I watched Zootopia, which struck me as a fitting morality tale for our age, as it embraces ideas such as diversity, moral relativism, and new technologies. I am fascinated by this evolution of the morality tale, which goes back to our discussion on how old fairy tales, like Little Red Riding Hood, are revisited and remixed as deemed necessary.

Son of Rambow: What is "Children's Media?"

The kids in  Son of Rambow are most likely the kind of kids that will be the first to tell you that they aren't children. Yet, as adults we see this film as being one about childhood. Perhaps it's because we understand that children deal with hardship in a very different way than we do, and that's what this film is about: it's about kids kind of doing self-therapy for hard stuff. First we have Will, who doesn't seem to have any friends, doesn't have a dad, and is held tight to the strict guidelines of religion. He isn't allowed to watch movies and then the first movie he sees is Rambo, which is hardly a movie for kids. Yet, it is more important for him than what we might deem an "age appropriate film" would be. Then there is Lee Carter, who is mostly left to his own devices and has an inclination towards filmmaking and manipulates Will into helping out, most likely using him as a way to exercise control over someone the way his brother is able to over him. The third is Didier, a foreigner in a new land, seemingly bored by everything except his desire to be a movie star. It's clear that the common denominator among these three is that they aren't properly equipped to handle this middle ground of being a kid yet having adult problems. It makes sense for them to cling to a film like Rambo, where the hero is able to handle anything that comes at his way with absolutely no problem. It makes sense that Will fancies himself as the son of Rambo, since his father was killed by something beyond his control, whereas Rambo is the master of control: physically and emotionally. it makes sense that Lee takes on the role of director and producer, assuming creative control of the film and becoming frustrated when that control is taken away from him. It's like Max in Where the Wild Things Are, frustrated with his mom and escaping to a land where he gets to be in charge. It makes sense that Didier wants to be an actor: his whole persona seems like an act. He puts on costumes and says lines as if in a script. Probably because he is not sure who he is, and he is teased back home in his school in France.
So is this film media for children? Media about childhood? Or media consumed by children? As we determined last class, it's not really a question that can be easily answered. This film is unique in that it is about children and media. These kids basically work through their problems by creating a response to a film they have seen. It's a productive way of working through things and is teaching them how to take a situation and react to it in a creative way. Sometimes they slip up and deal with things through violence, but they are also learning empathy by trying to recreate scenes they are familiar with and by building relationships with each other, so the violence is always met with guilt. Ultimately, what mends the relationship between Will and Lee is the completion of Son of Rambow and it becomes a testament to friendship, the joy of being able to exercise creative control over a project that has a final product to show for, and being able to experience closure with the problems they unconsciously worked through with the making of this film. This film prompted me to do research on publications about how filmmaking might be beneficial for children and I came across a wide range of examples and theories about how kids can develop better thinking skills, awareness of space, overcome illness, and control emotions through media. This particular article does a good job of exploring what I expect this film is suggesting.

"Some educators believe that
 reading and language are directed most
 effectively when they are used in action.
 Jerome Bruner argues that when language
 conveys the content of experience, there is,
 . . more often than not a requirement of
 developing correspondence between what we
 do, what we see, and what we say. It is this
 correspondence that is most strikingly in-
 volved in reading and writing, in school learn-
 ing, and in other abstract pursuits."
 If this is true, then filming and role
 playing are ideal ways for children to em-
 ploy language and reading actively, and to
 make reading and language live. George
 Spache calls this kind of activity "active
 reacting to reading"and maintains that
 it is a key aspect of good reading compre-
 hension. It is my belief that there are few
 activities elementary children would find
 more interesting, stimulating, or active than
 filmmaking."

Fireside Chat

I interpreted this particular assignment as a kind of micro-capstone for this class. A chance to say anything I didn’t have a chance to express over the course of the semester, but also kind of summing up an underlying value that can be traced in doses throughout my TMA 112 collection. I’ve explored a lot of ideas about identity and gender, so that seemed like the natural focus for my project. I also wanted to treat the Fireside Chat as more of an art performance piece, that way I would be forced to creatively convey a particular issue, as we do with previous projects, rather than didactically preach, treat this as a therapy/confession session, or exploit personal experiences in order to achieve some sort of desired response.

I can’t remember the exact moment I knew what I was going to do, but after writing out my feelings on the subject, brainstorming some lackluster performance ideas, and talking several people’s ears off, I knew I wanted to deconstruct a box of tampons on stage. I have been concerned with the stigmatization of  feminine hygiene products for a while now. My own experiences dealing with being comfortable and not trying to diminish all evidence of this natural occurrence had a lot to do with the conception of this performance piece. In the piece, I bring a box of tampons on stage, hidden in a plastic bag. I open the box secretively, and quickly hide a tampon in my jacket. But when it falls out, I am forced to deal with the fact that my audience now knows of its existence, and the implications that come with having a tampon on you.

I think this is a big reason why women try to hide their tampons and periods in general. We think that if someone knows that we are menstruating, then they can assume we are also grumpy, having a difficult time, aren’t sexually available, and may be suffering from improper hygiene and weird smells. I believe in breaking this fear, and these assumptions. In my piece, I wanted to celebrate tampons in a way that broke people’s discomfort, or at least made them aware of it. I chose Bjork to dance to, who encompasses both the power as well as the nuances of being a woman. In my performance, I expected that the men, whom some of may have never seen the inside of a tampon package in their live, would experience some discomfort with the subject, and the women, who all have very personal experiences with this, would cringe at the money and valuable resource I was wasting. Believe me, I know.

There was an unexpected piece of my performance that I hope translated to some people, and that was the very end, where I had to clean up the mess I had made. I believe that this whole issue of women not being comfortable with publicly acknowledging their menstruations is them “cleaning up” their tampons for the sake of other people. Bleeding isn’t embarrassing, unless it’s associated with gender. I suggest that women stop carrying their entire backpack with them out of class when they go to bathroom. I suggest that we walk up to the checkout line with the male employee without a second thought because we have tampons and chocolate in our basket. I suggest we stop taxing products that we literally need in order to function once a month. I suggest that we just be more open with our bodies in general, and embrace and love our bodies.

Finally, there is the third layer of my performance: the flash poetry. I was inspired by Pipilotti Rist, a artist and filmmaker who explores similar themes about gender. In her feature film Pepperminta, Rist goes as far as to have her characters drink menstrual blood. It’s so beautiful, lyrical, and celebratory, I wanted to do the same. So to accompany the music and the performance, I included a piece of my own poetry about gender, sexuality, and identity. The poem uses phrases and words to paint a picture of confidence with ourselves and to encourage a movement towards being okay with our bodies, our genders, and the nuance and ambiguity in our identities.

Now that the performance is done, I am interested in exploring it more, and perhaps will replicate a similar performance elsewhere.

Concerned Citizen

Artists' Statement

The readings this past week talked a lot about how humans interact with other humans. It focused specifically on human rights but it also discussed what one group of people thought about another group of people. This goes well with the direction our documentary took. We decided to interview Courtney Kendrick. She currently works in the Provo City mayor’s office as a creative director. She works closely with a lot of the departments in the city and tries to help support the arts and major creativity aspects of the city. She also helps to plan and execute the rooftop concert series every year. She is very involved with the music scene here and local artists.

In the documentary, Courtney talks about the problems she sees around the city, and then about ways she has worked to remedy them. She says a lot of the problems in our community have to do, at their core, with Provo being a very non-diverse city. A lot of the people have the exact same upbringing and background, so people don’t work to make necessary changes to support those who are oppressed. Courtney works specifically to help women and those in minority groups to have a stronger voice in local politics and in business settings.

Courtney's attention to Provo's lack of diversity is really important for our community. She is one of many women in communities throughout the world striving to make change in regards to representation of women and people of color in politics, media, and the workforce. As Media Arts students, we should look to what she is doing and see how we can apply the same thoughtful, respectful, and diligent work into our own field. In December of last year, American actress Jessica Chastain wrote an essay about the production she was currently working on, The Zookeeper's Wife, directed by the female filmmaker Niki Caro. She says "I can't tell you-- it's amazing. I've never been on a set with so many women. We're not even 50 percent of the crew- we're probably something like 20 percent women and 80 percent men-- but it's way more than I've ever worked with before. Thee are female producers, a female screenwriter, a female novelist, a female protagonist and a female director." Chastain talks about how she strives to add to diversity in Hollywood, and acknowledges that while you want to work with people based on talent, some talented people have a much bigger hill to climb. 

And that's true here in Provo. As humans, we find comfort in the familiar. It's difficult to be surrounded by people with a different set of values and beliefs, we naturally homogenize. However by doing that, we are missing out on a world of growth and peace. So when Courtney talks about making Provo a safe zone for the 2% that don't fit into the white/LDS category, she is talking about making Provo better. And that might go against a lot of people's views, but that's part of being a concerned citizen- considering views that aren't your own, and working to make your community a place that isn't just about you. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xstn7l1AIz8&feature=youtu.be