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