Filming face (2/2) - MSJ

This graphic emerged out of a series of attempts to think about what sort of message to convey about the audience of MOOCs and what sort of message to convey about keyword videos. These were two topics around "face" we'd thought about when brainstorming. Since we (Erika, Erin, and Monika) all shied away from having our own faces featured in a video, we considered using puppets, creating avatars or having a video of ourselves from the back. The irony of having a "faceless" video discuss the keyword "face" seemed quite apropos. We also considered illustration. I decided to do a drawing. As we were group of three women, the figures in the resulting graphic could serve representations of our group. However, they are not "exact" representations but figures based on photos of other women that, I (Monika), as the illustrator, had the ability to draw.

Once the figures were drawn up and we began to seriously consider using the image to critique MOOCs and started in After Effects to make the video, I began to have hesitations about what sorts of messages the graphic gives. How might these figures be read? While the silhouetted hairstyles and lack of profiles or obvious physical facial features makes speculation about the ethnic or racial makeup of these women difficult, the style of the drawing does suggest that the faceless students are youthful, able-bodied women. Might these women be seen as suggested typical or archetypical, anonymous MOOC students (or archetypical FemTechNet members)? Is this a useful connotation or is it a distortion? Would MOOC students look at this image and recoil because they did not see any representations that looked like themselves?

This inner critique led me, at one point, to create another. This time, I drew a gender ambiguous person in a wheelchair, an overweight figure, and another figure sitting in a chair. However, again these figures were drawn in a style that was realistic, and perhaps for this reason the graphic did not at all resolve the problem I was facing. Instead the second graphic actually rather reified and sensationalized differences -- like a bad Benetton ad. 

What was I trying to achieve? Was this a futile exercise? After all, a core question that our group had hoped to raise with our video was not, “How can we best represent the students of MOOCs?” but rather, “Who are the students of MOOCs and how is knowing them an issue of visibility that is difficult to address because of the very structure of MOOCs?” 

In thinking about this, I wondered if a better way to address the question of (in)visibility – both of students to the instructor, to each other, and the problem of a default of online visibility -- would be to draw figures without using a realist technique. Perhaps little icons or even just text boxes with stick figures would be a more successful approach -- leaving the labor of answering the question, “Who are these students?” to the audience as they try themselves to fill in the characteristics.

But these final thoughts came during and after we began to craft the video, using the initial drawing. And as it functions now in this video, the graphic highlights the collapse of three intentions: to fashion an anonymous self-representation, to critique the offering of one’s face as automatically visible, and to question who MOOC students are, how they’re imagined, and how this format is or is not conducive to embodied learning. It is my hope that the latter issue is indeed raised in the video with the starkness of the black and white image, the hidden facial features and static immobility of the figures on contrast to the colorful, live video, and the choppy pop-up boxes that resemble text messages which are suggestive of the style of interactivity embedded in this model of learning.

The fact remains, though, that the figures could still be read as a archetypical representation of MOOC students (or FemTechNet students) as able-bodied and female. This connotation makes me consider how I will conduct my next trial in illustration knowing now that even graphic images designed as critique are as much a vehicle for meaning as text, photography, and juxtaposition. So what configuration of figures could convey both the sense of simultaneous facelessness and embodiment that is nevertheless neither an unconscious replication of the people I just happen to know nor a sentimental, overly obvious portrait of difference? Should there be figures at all?

-MSJ

Filming face (1/2) - EC/MSJ

Reflections on how we came to make our keyword video (1/2)

Initially, we (Erika, Erin and Monika) intended to extend our project on “Face” to a keyword video about “Face.” Broadly, we thought the topics we could address would be some of the questions we raised about ownership, self-presentation, representation, femininity, and mediation in a cinematic format.

Potential Topics

• face and/vs skin, tissue
• frozen face - indicative of loss of control, super-control
• face and social consequences/the judgment of others - “emotional outburst”, “appropriate display of emotion”
• various identity politics:
• full and partial face transplants
• patient’s desire for particular info regarding skin donor
• fake identities (creating an identity using stock photos - buying someone’s face)
• selling your face/image (models)
• masquerade, veiling, passing
• as reflection
• for identity formation

However, one of the issues we wanted to tackle as well was how to make the video. A question that came up as we thought about the topic we wanted to address, face, was that some of the very practices we were looking to critique we thought were in some ways embodied in the existing keyword videos made and available in the FemTechNet archive. We brainstormed how to address this by thinking about what the video should/could do.

What should the video do? (possibilities)

• explicitly draw on theorists and make a video that discusses "face" from various feminist perspectives using text and images
• contribute (+support) the DOCC project by making a video in a "talking head" format explicitly drawing on theorists who have discussed "face"
• critique the existing videos (implicitly or explicitly)
• critique of wider issues of identity and face
• offer a disclaimer highlighting awareness of limits of the medium

We came up with a few different forms that we thought might help us convey these messages in a way that was not reproducing our own, or someone else’s, face. We also discussed not having any representations at all, but rather telling stories of faces through words only.

Options on our form:

1. Drawing of face with omniscient narrator(s)

2. Unfolding words -- through chatroom-style story to which people are simultaneously contributing; unfolding of paper

We hoped through the intertwining of form and content, we could address recurring themes. We opted against making a “keyword” video with a talking head, as we considered that the content and form are both central to meaning of the film.

Themes:

• face isn’t singular
• multiple aspects
• multiples ways of making appearances (gender, class, nationality, age, etc.)
• face is both material and social
• appearances matter (timing, location, physicality, etc.)
• face is a strong signal of identity/personhood (endurance/change)
• face as metaphorical language (facing something, losing face, saving face, giving face)

Stories:

• Getting someone else’s face, face transplants - Erin
• Buying a stock photo to create a secondary persona - Monika  
• Creating and using avatars on message boards - Erika

So how did we get to critiquing MOOC videos? This move was actually smooth -- around the time that we were thinking about what sort a hook we could use for our keyword video, 

Erika and Monika learned that UCSD had signed an agreement with Coursera to start developing MOOCs and that there were movements to help professors develop themselves as MOOC presenters.  The open letter from the San Jose State University Philosophy Department protesting the requirement to use Harvard University professor Michael Sandel’s Justice videos as pedagogical tools for their classes had also recently been published.

This got us thinking about the way that a MOOC presents a professor as a particular kind of “face” that does a particular kind of labor separate from the professor her/himself.  MOOC videos often follow the "talking head" model of TED talks, where a lone speaker lectures to an audience. TED talks are recorded, then uploaded so that anyone with Internet access can watch the talk, regardless of where they are and what time of day it is. We surmised that there are certain assumptions about how video images of these figures would be received and used, namely that they would be treated respectfully and would not be subject to remixing or editing which could significantly alter the message intended by the speaker. In the case of Coursera, there was also the issue of branding, where a professor’s face could be appropriated to represent not only the university of employment but also the MOOC company itself.

We wanted to try to address these issues of audience reception, possibility of remixing, appropriation of labor, and branding through the image of a video-taped and digitally distributed MOOC professor. To do so, we downloaded an episode from Michael Sandel’s Justice course (available on YouTube) and created a scenario where a few students would watch the video and comment on it as it played. Monika created a black-and-white graphic of three students in silhouette around a computer monitor (which she addresses in greater detail in "Filming face (2/2)"). 

Using After Effects, we inserted the Justice video, which was in full color, in the space of the computer monitor. The juxtaposition between black-and-white/color, the fact that the students made comments in the form of speech bubbles rather than through voice-acting while Sandel’s voice can be heard throughout, and certain lines of dialogue served to highlight the gap between students and teacher and the lack of interactivity in the MOOC model. At one point, the video repeats itself, pointing out the potential for each video to be edited by third parties for purposes other than those originally intended. The repetition is also meant to highlight the differences in labor type performed by a professor who must go through the act of giving a lecture and managing a classroom and the type of labor performed by the video image of the professor which can serve to obscure the first type of labor. Finally, the video ends with the open question of who or what Michael Sandel represents in our project: Harvard? edX? UCSD? FemTechNet?  Does he get a say in who or what can claim him as their face?  Does he have any claims of ownership to his image?

-EC/MSJ

Wikipedia edit: Color chart

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_chart

I broadened the definition of the color chart, which had not included any mention of color reference cards involving images of people.  I also added a section on Shirley cards.

I'm not sure how to change the entire title of the stub from "color chart" to "color reference card", which I think would be a more representative title.  I also refrained from including images due to uncertainty around copyright.

EC

Assembling Face -- Reflection 3/3 (MSJ) Masked Face

This is the third of three responses I wrote about our object project "Assembling Face." //MSJ

--

You lay still on the floor and patient hands smooth crinkly aluminum across your face, covering your eyes and cheeks. Only your nostrils are left uncovered. The hands then press on to you pre-prepared cut strips of computer paper soggy with a flour and water mixture. With your eyes closed, your senses are heightened. The smell of flour is strong. The gentle pressure of the fingers is acute. Pleasurable in isolation. It occurs to you that having someone dedicate a focused, gentle touch across your face while you do nothing by lay silently, concentrating your attention only on this experience, is unusual. You are relaxed and the mask is built. Liquid rolls down the foil into hair and ears, though, sticking. You bring your hand up to wipe it away. Messy.

Within in minutes the mask is done. You slither out from under to admire.

It takes a day and a half for the imprint to dry into a hardened paper-mache mask. When it does, you don’t really recognize yourself in it. You try putting in on. Then you use a bit of extra paper and flour mixture to cover over the nose holes. The color of the mixture is somehow more bleached than the initial mask, the later addition marked with color.

This is an imprecise imprint of your face, thanks to the aluminum, but it's an imprint that's materially distinct and will likely last for a while. You’ve now got it hung on your wall. It looks nice. A conversation starter, perhaps. Or maybe a fun mask to wear of yourself at Halloween, to serve as a material critique of always having your face increasingly subject to being photographed, under surveillance, or just scrutinized.

Assembling Face -- Reflection 2/3 (MSJ) Digital Face

This is the second of three responses I wrote about our object project "Assembling Face." //MSJ

--

Visualized like this, your face appears both disembodied and entirely absent of all associations you have with yourself – eagerness, attention, concern, energy, sweat, hair and height. You had to hold very still for this to digitally render and consequently when you look at the image that came out of it – a capture of a moment -- you just don’t recognize yourself for a minute.

These digital measurements have actually made you into something else. That is, one snapshot, measured from the white circle with a black square inside, provided the reference for making multiple projections of you from different angles, different times. You've been transformed from 3-D to 3-D (made from data points). 

If you were scarred, this 3-D imaging software would be used find the gaps and holes in your skin's surface and provide a digital map for filling them precisely.

You wonder if the digital measuring stick, which is making a heat map and a distance map, can see the holes and pains in your skin that are not measurable through heat or distance. Do you have any that appear through your expressions? 

Wikipedia Entry

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Harriet_L._Childe-Pemberton

Following our discussion on citational practices (and how those may affect disciplinary canon formations) earlier this quarter, I wanted to create a Wikipedia stub on the less cited English Victorian author, Harriet Louisa Childe-Pemberton.  Since there are few sources available about Childe-Pemberton, I have yet to find biographical information.  This page is my attempt to aggregate her published work. If the page is published on Wikipedia, I would like to continue this work by annotating each of her publications.

Here is a copy of what I created on Wikipedia:

An English author in the late Victorian era, Harriet Louisa Childe-Pemberton wrote plays, poems, short stories, novels, and literary criticism.^[1]

Her published work includes:

Birdie: A Tale of Child Life ^[2]

Dead letters, and other narrative and dramatic pieces ^[3]

The Fairy Tales of Every Day ^[4]

In a Tuscan villa and other poems ^[5]

Nenuphar: the four-fold flower of life ^[6]

No Beauty ^[7]

The Story of Stella Peel ^[8]

Under the Trees ^[9]

References

1. ^ Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. "Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. "Rewriting “Little Red Riding Hood”: Victorian Fairy Tales and Mass-Visual Culture." The Lion and the Unicorn 33.3 (2009): 259-281.". Project MUSE.
2. ^ Childe-Pemberton, Harriet. "Birdie: A Tale of Child Life".
3. ^ Childe-Pemberton, Harriet. "Dead letters, and other narrative and dramatic pieces".
4. ^ Childe-Pemberton, Harriet. "The Fairy Tales of Every Day".
5. ^ Childe-Pemberton, Harriet. "In a Tuscan villa and other poems".
6. ^ Childe-Pemberton, Harriet. "Nenuphar: the four-fold flower of life".
7. ^ Childe-Pemberton, Harriet. "No Beauty".
8. ^ Childe-Pemberton, Harriet. "The Story of Stella Peel".
9. ^ Childe-Pemberton, Harriet. "Under the Trees".

McGillis, Roderick. "Lame Old Bachelor, Lonely Old Maid: Harriet Childe-Pemberton's 'All My Doing; or Red Riding Hood Over Again.'" Aspects and Issues in the History of Children's Literature. Ed. Maria Nikolajeva. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995. 127-38. Print.

This article about an English writer, poet or playwright is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.