A Review of Screen Media Arts: An Introduction to Concepts and Practices

Screen Media Arts by Hart Cohen, Juan Salazar and Iqbal Barkat is a superb book designed to be used in introductory and advanced university classes that study both traditional and digital media. The book comes with a DVD which adds not only resources to the book, but moves the book beyond the conventional boundaries of text and paper. The Australian Publishers Association has short listed the book for a major award.

The book examines areas like the relationships among photographs, images and the transformation of images into data and information. The range is broad, from Roland Barthes to Marshall McLuhan to animation, documentary cinema, narrative cinema with an excellent chapter on experimental film; in each instance there is depth and intellectual rigour. For example, Chapter Two, which deals with Narrative Forms and Screen Media Arts, introduces the typology of Valdimir Propp alongside a discussion of the linguist Roman Jakobson and the anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss.

The interconnections here are important and often not recognized by modern day scholars in film. The efforts in the 1970's to develop a semiotics of the cinema, led in large measure by the research and writings of Christian Metz, were profoundly influenced by linguistics. [Jakobson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Jakobson), whose work was in phonetics, was very interested in typologies because systems of classification make it possible to describe complex systems in a fundamentally simple way. Levi-Strauss was deeply influenced by this, and his early work builds on Jakobson's insights. Metz tries to redefine the relationships between language and film and searches for a systemic way of explaining how meaning comes to be organized in specific patterns, particularly in narrative film. However, he doesn’t adequately define the nature of the filmic system and ends up suggesting the presence of grammar-like processes that determine film’s signifying properties. Chapter Two grapples with these issues and includes a number of questions that should push students to investigate this important history in much greater detail.

One of the key claims in the book is that 'digitisation' expands the potential for story-telling in the cinema. Although I agree that interactive tools and virtual worlds have had a transformative effect on the nature of images, I am not altogether sure that audience participation also transforms the rules of narrative. The best place to examine this claim would be through a systematic examination of YouTube which is referenced in the book more as a resource than as an object of study. Chapter 16, which deals with Social Media, engages with the plethora of media but creates an inventory rather than connecting social media more fully and richly to questions of narrative. At the same time, Chapter Four, which is one of the best chapters in the book, engages in a profound manner with the shifting space of audience concerns and interests.

Part Two, which is made up of five chapters, deals with a variety of technical issues around production, legal constraints in filmmaking, directing and editing. These chapters will be useful for practitioners. Editing is seen through the theories of Sergei Eisenstein. The notion that the combination of a number of shots (sometimes just two) will produce an “idea” is based on Eisenstein’s overall premise that a universal visual competence governs the ways in which pictorial languages are understood and also the ways in which the specific properties of communication of a given shot are created, recognized and perceived. This fits in with Eisenstein’s emphasis which is drawn in a mechanical way from behavioural ([Pavlovian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov)) psychology. The Chapter on editing needed to examine this debate in greater detail and relate its presumptions back to the earlier chapters on narrative.

The last chapter of the book explores the present and future in screen media and has some excellent examples of media that are pushing the accepted boundaries both at the level of production and with respect to narrative structures and orientation.

Screen Media Arts stands out among the vast number of introductory texts available on the market!

Towards a Sustainable World

I have been rereading portions of my recently published book, How Images Think, not out of some sad state of hubris, but because I have been trying to understand why I chose the title. I should add that the title of the book has led to far more comment than much of the content, which says a great deal about the ways in which books are read and critiqued these days.

The comments that follow were provoked in large part by a brilliant lecture given by Bruno Latour to the British Sociological Association in April of 2007. Readers of this Blog and my web site will know that I am a profound admirer of Latour’s work.

I will provide the context for his essay in a moment. At a crucial point in his lecture he says, “objects have become things that is, issues, gatherings, assemblies of some sort.” (A Plea for Earthly Sciences, Keynote Lecture, British Sociological Association, p. 5) And, this is I now realize with hindsight, what was behind my selection of How Images Think as a title. “Things” in the broadest sense of that word operate within a world of discourse and language. Things have lost (and perhaps never had) a direct simplicity of meaning and instead have evolved into clusters with complex foundations and even more complex uses.

Religions have always built multi-faceted rituals around icons and symbols. Churches are objects as are the stained glass windows in them. The things that surround us carry varying degrees of weight depending on what we attribute to them. Attribution is the key.
Children who have teddy bears use attribution to give a silent, soft piece of fabric a highly charged set of meanings. A blanket can become a friend. Over time the nostalgia for that simple set of relationships becomes a characteristic of how people define their childhoods.

The history of things is further amplified when they are saved or placed into museums. Meaning is both attributed to and drawn from things in a continuous process of negotiation, the outcome of which cannot often be determined in advance. So much depends on context and language.

Attribution, amplification — words that describe the intense and interactive ways in which people sustain not only the social space they inhabit, but also the natural world. Latour’s presentation asks us to recognize the degree to which we have objectified things and in so doing collapsed and devalued the shared space we inhabit — nature as well as what we have built.

Nature treated as an object of exploitation and use leads to unsustainable practices. The environmental crisis in this context is not just another challenge that humans must face. Rather, it is a sign of the disrespect that we have for the collective space that we share with both humans and non-humans. And, as the environment deteriorates further and further, the abuse eventually leads to destruction. When you begin to think of objects differently, then all of our relationships slip into the foreground and one can sensitively apply values and ethical standards to all aspects of life, not just those that seem to be the most needed or expedient or socially based.
So, How Images Think is a title that suggests a change in the ways in which humans relate to images not simply as objects but as sites of communion and sharing. This is a collective engagement that draws upon images as objects of interaction, as provocateurs, as reflections, as windows and as sources of insight. We think, dream and communicate through images. In that sense, images are hybrids — the collective representations of human thought — things that live because of what we do to and with them.

In that sense, we need to ask questions about the application of thought to the human and object world we inhabit. This is urgent. Our environment cannot sustain humanity's prideful ideology that the crisis that the planet is in is simply one of many challenges that must be overcome. This is for the time being our only and most important challenge.

The Poet's Challenge to Learning

Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore's work on education and learning (He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.) is of great significance and is not as well known as it should be in the West. In keeping with the richness and diversity of Tagore's vision, I would like to comment on a superb paper (The Poet's Challenge to Schooling: Creative Freedom for the Human Soul) by Shilpa Jain and others that explores not only Tagore's philosophy but his impact on the essential spirit, if not the soul of what it means to learn and be taught.

I would like to recount an experience, which I had some years ago during a visit to an experimental school in California, and how it affected my own expectations about teaching and learning. I was invited to a Rudolf Steiner School to examine their approach as well as to learn more about how they hoped to change the experience of learners in a positive and constructive fashion. I have many doubts about the underlying religious foundations for Steiner education, but I saw something that really affected me that is closely linked to the spirit of Tagore's perspective on education.

My hosts took me to a small elementary school that had been built at the edge of an agricultural area. Once inside the school, I noticed that the ceilings were quite low and that the furniture was considerably smaller than I had anticipated. One classroom had a very small door built into a larger one and as I looked into the classroom, I noticed that the desks were also smaller than usual. I asked the Director of the school why this was so and she explained that they had decided to tailor the architecture to the size of the children in order to make them more comfortable with the scale of the space. This struck me as an extraordinary idea. Children see the world around them from a very different perspective. Adults can seem like giants even when they are gentle. Scale, perspective and space are crucial components of a child's world, but are often disregarded. In fact, the general architecture of schools is poor and rarely takes students and their experience as a central premise for the design process. These factors are not minor ones for learners. Why would the school system be so unaware of their importance? There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is a lack of synchronicity between the higher purpose of learning and the everyday needs of learners.

This goes to the heart of one of Tagore's concerns, which is the relationship between creativity and freedom. Schools are presently designed to teach students and are not centred on the principles of learning. The lack of a holistic viewpoint of the sort suggested by Tagore is missing. Keep in mind, that my own view of learning is that it is very ephemeral and that for the most part, schools have outlived their usefulness in their present form and need to be completely rethought. This point of view is summarized in the following quote from Jain's piece:

"…the very act of creation is freedom, for it allows human beings to discover their full potential. They have the opportunity to live what is theirs, to make the world of their own selection, and to move it through their own movement." (Page 11 of The Poet's Challenge to Schooling: Creative Freedom for the Human Soul)

In order for creativity to be released and for students to discover their real purpose in learning, they have to have the power to criticize and reflect upon the experiences that they are having. This is much more difficult than it appears. It is part of a double bind. If the students themselves have not learned enough to make their criticism rigourous and well-thought out, then their commentary will fall on deaf ears. On the other hand, if the environment does not facilitate the growth and the development of enough intellectual acuity, the quality of their discourse will be poor. This is not dissimilar to Tagore's commentary on the alienating experience that students have as they struggle with the banality of school and the lack of respect for nature and spirituality in the school system.

From my own perspective as the President of a University of Art and Design, I am most interested in the history of Santiniketan, the ashram that Tagore founded which turned into a school and now is a university. My own experience has taught me that institutions are very far away from understanding their own cultures with enough depth to engage in real change. This may seem like a dramatic statement, but the reality is that even the best of leaders tire out very quickly as they encounter increasingly complex levels of resistance to sometimes urgently needed shifts. The question is, what is it about an educational institution that breeds so much resistance? The answer is not a simple one because there are also numerous institutions in which radical thinking is taking place.

There is something fundamental about schooling that Tagore understood. In order to keep a school going the experience has to be systematized, that is, days have to be ordered and classes scheduled and marks given. Yet, it is precisely structures of this kind, which inhibit the development of open spaces and places for learning. What is unclear about Tagore’s perspective is how to ‘free’ up institutions — how to create enough of a sense of community to sustain open-ended inquiry and freshness of thinking. Tagore looked to nature as an example and in this he is quite close to the thinking of Thoreau and Rousseau. It is unclear how long that openness can be maintained without introducing some expectations both on the part of learners and teachers. In other words, there is a profound romanticism at the core of Tagore’s thinking and practice. It is a romanticism that I support, but for which there is no social, political or cultural consensus.

Even Tagore’s use of art and music mirrors many other experiments from Steiner through to Montessori. Jain’s paper explores all the facets of Tagore’s wonderful effort to build a new way of thinking about the world and about learning, but it fails to address the fundamental issues of institutional culture and institutional change. Given the large number of people are seeking to learn and the incredible investment of time and money into institutions ostensibly devoted to learning, strategies of institutional transformation seem to me to hold the key to future change in education as a whole.

Generation T

I was privileged to attend and present at an amazing conference in Ottawa recently. The Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which was established by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and supports hundreds of students at post-secondary institutions in Canada hosts an annual meeting entitled, "Think Again." Approximately, 250 laureates attend. Most are in university or college and often nearing completion of their degrees.

The Program for the meeting has the following quote from Frank Palmer, who is the founder and CEO of DDB advertising agency. "Love experiments, learn to collaborate, ask different questions, try not to criticize, sweat the small stuff, never stop learning/moving, seek better ways, bury your ego, celebrate successes, love your job or leave it and be fearless."

I presented in a workshop entitled, "Your actions, your communities."

Here are some of the questions that I asked:

Communities are defined by boundaries and by similarities and differences among its members.

How are these differences/similarities articulated?

How do symbols work to sustain communities?

Communities are repositories of symbols from memorials to political structures to icons, sports teams and cultural markers.

How do we find out what a community means to its members?

Are the feelings of commonality strong enough to overcome difference and what are the boundaries of commonality?

As boundaries become less viable, symbols become more and more important.

As the definition of community changes, its symbolic elements take on greater meaning.

As the nation-state shifts from a broad-based coalition to a multiplicity of tribes, each tribe looks to icons and images for clarity and meaning.

The world, as Thomas Friedman has suggested may be flat, but the fissures and cracks have created fault lines that have led to more and more difference, real and imaginary.

Between January 2000 and the completion of its mandate in 2009, the foundation will have distributed approximately one million awards to students across Canada

Community

“Community suggests a place and a space of commonality — sharing. Community also suggests difference — characteristics which distinguish one group from another, one individual from another. As Anthony Cohen has put it, community expresses a “relational idea that allows social groups to define and create boundaries between themselves and others.

Community, the profound sense of attachment that we have to place and to people, is as much about geography as it is about imagination. The maps we draw produce borders that we cross with our minds even as we defend the more closed and shadowy concepts of nation, province or locality.