Digital Literacies

I have a tough job keeping up with blogging, Flickr and Facebook. I like to keep up some kind of presence on all of them – communicating with different groups of people on each one – with my blog probably serving my purposes more than that of any readers’. My blog is me thinking stuff through; Flickr I like to comment on photos and have comments back. I definitely want interaction on Flickr. Most of my Flickr contacts are people I met IN Flickr rather than knowing them before. It has opened up new groups of people for me. Facebook is the place where I only talk to people I know face to face; it does the job of helping me keep in touch with friends and family I don’t see often. So I have my own ideas about how I want to interact in ecah space and who with. I wish I had time to keep up with Twitter – I follow loads of people who I think are interesting … and I am able to pick up their leads to useful sites and bits of info. I really appreciate it all – but at the moment don’t offer much. And I think I have not really yet worked out properly qhat I want Twitter to do for me and how I want to use it.

On Twitter I love how you can gather names of like minded people – I use mine to follow people interested in web 2.0 and education – but there are only so many hours in the day and I have not worked out yet exactly how to get the best from it, for my purposes. However I do really love to see what Orange Class (known as ClassroomTweets) are up to and think it is wonderful that a Year One group of kids are learning about how they can communicate beyond their classroom walls – that learning need not be confined to the space they are in. They have a teacher, MultiMartin, who is very inspirational and always looking for ways to broaden the learning experiences of his class. And in case you are wondering, here’s a handy list of reasons why teachers might decide to use Twitter.

In the meantime Mrs Cassidy has won an award and has showcased her Web 2.0 classroom activities on a super new video.

I love how her kids present the video and are so proud to show their learning. I am sure that knowing they can share what they do, engages them and motivates them.

Finally, I have another interest in the way people challenge walls … and that is with streetart. Here’s some from Toronto:

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It seems to be taking ages to get the year off to a start. The snow is still slowing everythng down and so I hardly feel I am off the starting blocks. In January there always remain a few post-Christmas traces…. not just the extra weight on my scales… but also stuff like unfinished chocolates:

and bits of tinsel still stuck between the carpet tufts. Beautiful as it sometimes is, the snow has been making it hard to get about. It seems quiet everywhere.

As I have been mentioning the last few weeks, I have been getting into Flickr again and been thinking about good shots to take and enjoying looking at things others are taking. I really love Sophies’ Photos and was interested in how this particular image draws on the book by Annette Kuhn – something I have used in an article I wrote for Discourse. What I have started to become interested in now, is images which show traces of what has been; which show a history. You have to be like an archeologist and look for clues – look at the layers of meaning, at the traces of what is there. This idea relates in some way to palimpsest; there is a good definition(illustrated) in the Palimpsest Flickr group here. Palimpsest might be this kind of thing:

this paring away of text is something that appeals to me and reminds me of the research process which involves tracings and the discernment of patterns – making sense from little things you gather. I am looking forward to February when I will FINALLY have the space to write my article on Streetart and spaces and how narratives can travel across time and space – often aided by online technologies. I talked about this kind of thing in Toronto – July 2008; details here.

And then I will focus on Facebook, where I will be researching how multimodal narratives travel across spaces via multiple, dispersed authors. Yes. That is what I will be doing soon.

Davies, J. (2007) ‘Display; Identity and the Everyday: Self-presentation through online image sharing’. In Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education. Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 549_564.

The thing I like about Christmas is that I get hardly any emails from work; normally when I am on holiday, nobody else is – like in the summer we take holidays one after the other so that there is always someone around to deal with ’stuff’. So the place keeps going and the emails keep coming. It is the down side of going on holiday – you choose whether to keep looking in your inbox while away, or whether to come back to a deluge. But at Christmas we all take a break and it is such bliss knowing that my inbox is not getting crammed full of demands, whines, instructions, requests etc etc. I am less afraid of my computer at Christmas and so in that case feel more relaxed about going online .. knowing I can come along and play on Flickr and do blogging, facebook and Twitter (etc), with no pressure from elsewhere.
Doesn’t sound like me?? Much as I wax lyrical about the wonderfulness of technology, (and you can barely tear me away most of the time), it does mean that my work can get at me 24/7; even when on a weekend away or a holiday, I will always look at work email as it is always just a window away or sharing the mailbox with all the other messages needed to run my life. It’s a click that takes you into work … and a click that can get you so totally stressed out very quickly. This merging of the public/private and home/work identities can be a ball … but it is sometimes SUCH a tyranny. (And I know you all know EXACTLY where I am coming from here).

So yes, I have been having some time to play with my camera, take photos for fun and mess around in photoshop. So I have been into town and taken in an exhibition .. ‘Can Art Save us?’ Seriously it was incoherent and just yet another excuse for Sheffield Museums to drag out the old Ruskin stuff again. It dominated the exhibition and I have got bored of reading about his philosophy of art and education. (There was a Tom Hunter portrait but I have seen it before and it was one of about three pieces I liked). Don’t go – save your self the £4.00. (Better to go to Graves Gallery nearby as we did yesterday and see the Mapplethorpe show and The Comedians).

Checked out the street art (by Phlegm) I had seen on Clydehouses’ Flickr stream the other day; and took a few shots myself:

I also loved today this website which hosts ‘one sentence stories’. Made me think you could play with that idea on Twitter.

but hey, I have been busy.

Thank Goodness I have a short break now before the new academic year. (Although Guy and I do need to finish that book (2009, we hope) Web 2.0 for Schools: Learning and Social Participation for this series before end of August … but it’s coming along …)

This last few weeks I have been to this conference hosted by UKLA – did a keynote with Guy that links into our new book (did I mention that?)

And then moved on to Mississauga, near Toronto where I did a summer school with Guy, Colin and Michele. That was fun. here is the slideshow of my keynote on the interface between Flickr and Streetart (and stuff).

Am now in New Jersey, having a fabulous time meeting Flickr Friends and partying.

Been looking at streetart as usual:

had our first ever facebook party. Met so many interesting people.

(Thanks to TT for image.)

the loveliness of this idea as a piece of streetart by joshua allen harris… oh it is delicious….

(Thanks to the food of the future for this).
There is also this video which shows an hour in the life of a Banksy piece:

There is some doubt about the authenticity of the guy in this video … and it’s probably and April fool thing

Really loving the way these pieces spread round the web these days.

There’s nothing like a good meme or a good piece of gossip.

Here’s swoon talking at MOMA about her work:

and part Two:

I am currently drafting an article called:

Location Location Location: Changing places, modes and meanings of streetart as digital image

Briefly it’s about the use of online spaces to promote and share streetart and the ways in which the online space impacts on meanings of the art and how this then is brought back to the street…. that is to say, that I have seen how streetartists use Flickr to promote their work; to talk about their work; to show their work. They influence each other online; they see how flickr people respond to their work and and how they love to photograph it. And this can impact on what artists do next – and they certainly participate in photographing and ‘collecting’ the art in Flickr spaces. This whole process creates an interesting and dynamic archive online where images are replicated, arranged, labelled, organised and tagged. The art work becomes part of multiple narratives and acts differently for different people, meaning different things.

Themes in the article will be:

• Different modes and moving texts from one place to another
• Re-articulation of materiality
• Meanings change
• Presentations of identity
• Transforming spaces
• Interaction of items with environment and interaction of people with the art (or not)
• Changing over time
• Mash-ups
• Replications and memes

I will submit it to Visual Communication and hope for the best.

And, I forgot to mention, I found out about the Swoon videos, because another street artist, anaperu told me about it in a comment on this picture here. So there we are. More evidence, my dear Watson.

It made me laugh to see on Flickr that Elbowtoe has done a wheatpaste of Gamma Blog.

OPEN AIR from knox on Vimeo.

People often talk about Sheffield as being ‘like a village’. Well somehow when I am on Flickr, the whole world seems like a village.

Does that mean I am a Geek?

A kind of reverse grafitti is shown here with a acharity for the homeless cleaning up walls covered in streetart … but leaving a new trace… just the shape of a homeless person crouching for warmth.

And so we have two very different examples of new literacy practices – involving the use of memes and text reproduction.

The National Gallery is promoting its wares (does it need to?) and is putting 40 works of art on the street . Huge reproductions on vinyl are being placed strategically (streetegically) across London. The project is called Grand Tour and is an interesting one.
What makes it OK for some art work to be shown and not others?
(Banksy’s work is now allowed in some cities.)

I presume it is a case of permissions from those who rule and those we must obey. But it is also interesting to see what might happen. Will the meanings of the art change when it is placed out there in the environment? Does streetart change when it is permitted to be there? Is it still real stretart if it has been commissioned? Is it less edgy? Does it lose credibility?

And when you put art out there on the street … where does the art end? At the edges of the artefact?

I think the meanings of art work derive partly from its provenance – the way it is used, where it has been, how people read it – even interact with it. Will people be upset if someone adds a moustache to the faces on these classical /street art works? More info about the project here.

And are these mashups?

In the meantime other art makes the journey another way … streetart is sometimes brought off the street into new places. For example there are so many people on Flickr who collect streetart images, collating and cataloguing. How does that change their meanings and their value? The currency is different I think when you bring an image to a webspace; it is partly about the creation of a new piece; partly seeing something first; even about adding to your collection.

People look at streetart differently in the new online context. The images look different when you see them on your pc screen; you experience the art differently and people have taken the shots from particular angles – cutting some bits out and focusing on others.

Certainly I have joined in with this craze of catching streetart (eyes peeled as I walk)…

I have been keen to show all kinds of stuff I have seen – people ignoring it:

People appreciating it:

and people abusing it:

But I am also interested in how LunaPark has recently launched an exhibition of her streetart photography, showing the streetart from a particular locality, in a hall in that locality. There is a reverence and a particular desire to show a full range of streetart in LunaPark’s very meticulously catalogued Flickrstream.

Thanks to Gammablog for telling me about this exhibition….

I wonder if all the people who went to the exhibition were people who love streetart. I wonder if anyone went to it, saw it, and looked for the first time at what qualities so much streetart has?

I wonder.

And what of the streetartists? Lots of them love Flickr and learn about each other’s art through that space. They have made new contacts with other artists, planned exhibitions and shown their work through Flickr. (Some have told me, but I am not revealing their ID.)

Interesting to compare bloggers with streetartists – they share a belief andor a need to say something – to put stuff out there which will be read – or ignored.

Some people detest Web 2.0 just as some detest graffitti /streetart as it has not been legitimised through the culture mangle. I blogged recently about Andrew Keen’s book the cult of the amateur…. Keen is dismissive of those who dare to raise their voices and stick their noses over the parapet. (He is scared they will be better than he is.)

Just as with bloggers there are some good streetartists and some who should practice a bit more … but who should decide the standard? Who should legitimise?