I said she didn’t owe me anything, except to make a powerful site. She wanted to at least give me a bottle of fine wine. I said a muffin would suffice. I think Merry didn’t want to be only a taker, but to also give something for the help. In that sense I probably should have let her give me something.

Merry Death reading Thomas Joiner’s, Myths about Suicide

Free with Purchase

The thing is, Merry’s a student at CSULB, and I’m faculty. Which means that just like any of the other 2,148 faculty members here, I’m happy to help any student. Sometimes students can get so buried in coursework and other university hoops, that they forget that the university is like a gigantic, physical Wikipedia. It doesn’t matter if you’re enrolled in someone’s class or not, you can always drop by a faculty member’s office hours and ask them questions.

As a working class university we have students balancing all kinds of responsibilities and work loads. Still, if a student jets on and off campus barely stopping long enough to attend class, they’re really only getting half of the experience and value they’re paying for. Even with 7.275 billion humans alive today, history still holds 15 dead humans for every living. And every one of those 101 billion ancestors, and most of the 7.275 alive today, have never had the privilege of a resource like CSULB and its wildly diverse 2,149 faculty members. I’m happy that Merry took advantage of a little of what CSULB has to offer today. And I can’t encourage other students enough: sieze the opportunities that your time at the university offers! Why pay tuition and then sit in the last row? 59 years ago Rosa Parks redefined freedom in America by demanding her right to a seat in the bus. Why don’t CSULB students demand a seat in the (often empty) front row of the classroom?

It’s about Community

Merry truly owes me nothing. But if I have a wish for her and other CSULB students, it’s to use the extraordinary tools of our time to create compelling communities. Facebook and many other online platforms where we are the product, not the customer (aka meat packing factories) have an undeniable stickiness and allure to them. They’re quite literally designed to trigger dopamine releases.

Older sites like Facebook have converted from “pages” to “streams,” and newer platforms like Instagram (owned by Facebook) were born as streams. There’s no doubt that streams are efficient ways to surf a lot of content. Got a 10-minute break from your barista job? With a few finger swipes of your iPhone 6 Plus you can scroll past hours of your friends lives with enough time left over to even like a few of them.

Streams are a nice way to quickly update yourself on a thousand little things. The are new communities and have interesting power that I don’t want to be too quick to ignore. But I still love Pages.

The Blogosphere Lives?

Pages, and The Blogosphere, sort of died, perhaps in part because tycoons like Mark Zuckerberg steamrolled over them on the way to paving his industrial parking lot, but also because we’ve been flailing wildly trying to deal with the problem of abundance. Compared to the problem that those earlier 101 billion humans had, and that so many of the 7.275 alive today still have: scarcity, abundance is a good problem to have. But just because it’s better than scarcity, doesn’t mean that abundance isn’t a real and serious problem.

Your Facebook stream lets you have it all. One bite of every single dish at the endless buffet. But is it a meal?

People like David Weinberger, Thomas Vander Wal, Marco Arment, Gina Trapani, Jason Snell, and Andy Baio have been calling for a sort of Blogosphere revival often focusing on fast and modest length posts.

I’d love to see Merry find other students and faculty here at CSULB, at the grad school she’ll be soon heading off to, and out in the rest of the real world, that she can create her own corner of The Blogosphere with. People who read each other’s posts. People who leave comments. People who write reply posts. (tangential as it may be, this is more-or-less a reply post to Merry’s 1st post)

If Merry can start creating that sort of community, it’d be a far bigger thank you than even the nicest bottle of wine. If she can use these tools to build a community, she’ll have done something extraordinary.

And BTW, my favorite tool for reading blogs is Feedly.

WhatsApp!

This surprised me. I thought video chat would be more engaging and fun. And I know how hugely successful Google Video Hangouts are in the professional world. I think what I may have failed to realize is that a Video Chat is a lot like a Voice Call, and student-aged peeps have, I think, overwhelmingly chosen text apps like WhatsApp over voice. Just as email used to be “what you use to talk to old people,” a role that Facebook seems to have now, I think voice might be what you use to talk to parents, but WhatsApp is probably a more fun way to engage with friends.

SIDENOTE:
It’s interesting that the already aging Facebook is trying to stay relevant by buying both Instagram and WhatsApp and trying to buy Snapchat. (Facebook bought Instagram in Apr ’12 for US$1B, WhatsApp in Feb ’14 for US$19B, and unsuccessfully offered US$3B for Snapchat in Nov ’13)

Read

Whenever you visit a library you see one of those well-intentioned Read posters featuring some cool celebrity. I do think reading is important and valuable and the decline of reading probably isn’t good. But it’s also important to remember that back in the days of yore, reading didn’t have a lot of competition. Today reading not only has competition from films and myriad other media forms, but it also has competition from, well, reading! When you see a poster in a library that says “Read” it might be suggesting to read a book. But if you count all the messaging, blogs, and other online media that peeps read, that probably adds up to plenty of novels worth of pages in a year. We can debate whether the nature of short chunks of reading offers the same intellectual and analytic value that diving into the mind of a novel does.

Maybe a novel is a much richer experience for a human being.

Or maybe the interactivity and discussion of text, chat, blogs, and other media offers a rich space of community, interaction, and a place to test perceptions and ideas.

Infinite Choice

We probably should read more novels. It is an extraordinary form that at its best offers unique and powerful insights. But we should also appreciate that reading has a lot of competition today. Similarly, in the past, and in rural places, things could get boring. But in a place like Los Angeles in the 21st-media-century, boredom almost isn’t an option. One student commented that Foucault wouldn’t get tenure today! And I wonder how many students are ready or interested in embracing the subtlety of a John Cage or Allan Kaprow perspective when they have so many options and so much stimulation available in IRL Los Angeles plus the infinite vastness of YouTube and all the other online spaces.

Today’s academic model is about 200 years old. Affluent kids moved from boarding school to university. There wasn’t much else to do besides studying and pranks. I think college is still a place where new ideas and great friendship are formed. Does a class need to be part of that? Maybe. But the sorority, the anime club, the volleyball team, the debate team, and so many other options on and off campus also enrich the student experience.

Flexibility

Also dragging the discussions down is the idea that an online class is supposed to be at the learner’s convenience. So text chat: maybe. Video chat: way too much scheduling hassle.

Summer ’14 Art110 students in their “Counterfactual Identity” outfits.

Conclusions

Weekly video chat is out. There could be a possibility of having a week or 2 of special meetups so students could actually meet each other. Text chat is a possiblilty. But as one student noted, since they’re doing weekly creative activities and blogging the results, why not have them look at and comment on each other’s work.

I think that’s the best answer for next summer. Instead of discussion groups move to commenting on each other’s blogs. In the academic year F2F class with 150 students it’s easy to be lost. But in a summer class with 25, commenting on each other’s blog posts could be a way to develop better insight into what others are thinking and doing. And it preserves the asynchronous nature of online classes & text chat that students value.

In a way we’ve said a lot about Identity this summer: The photographs of Francesca Woodman, the photographs of Nikki S. Lee, this CFID project, the Landscapes with a Corpse project. But what we haven’t had a chance to do is look at the nearly 50 years of compelling contemporary art exploring Identity. Identity Art has been a place where oppressed and marginalized people have found a place to express themselves. A place to claim, reclaim, and rehabilitate their cultural identities.

There’s been powerful work from Feminist Artists like Judy Chicago & Barbara Kruger; Latin-American artists like Guillermo Gomez-Peña & Coco Fusco, African-American artists like Adrian Piper & Dread Scott; Native-American artists like Jimmy Durham & James Luna; LGBTQIA artists like Robert Mapplethorpe & Andy Warhol, and many others.

Anida Yoeu Ali & Facebook

Here’s a couple of recent Identity videos. The first, 1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslin is from Anida Yoeu Ali, an artist whose works span performance, installation, video, poetry, public encounters, and political agitation. She is a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. It is part of an ongoing project that engages art as a form of intervention against the racial profiling of Muslims in a post 9/11 era.

The second is a video on identity, coming out, & bullying, especially at young high-school and earlier ages, from Facebook.

1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim from Anida Yoeu Ali on Vimeo.

Your Projects

And on to your CFID Activities!

Li-Ren Chang

In a remarkable project Li-Ren decided to dress as a Communist and try to have discussions about Marxist ideology. Sadly he wasn’t able to have those conversations with the people he met. In fact, far from debating ideological nuance, he discovered that none of the people he spoke with even knew the difference between Taiwan & China! I think in a different location or around a different group of people, Li-Ren might have had very different and perhaps really interesting conversations.

Kelsey DeMeire

DeMeire put on the most random outfit she could come up with and then made this cool video wandering around Long Beach’s 2nd street area at night.

For the most part, everyone was nice and willing to talk to me despite the bright camera lights shining in their face. I only have two people walk away from me as if I was some crazy person, I can’t say I don’t blame them though. I’m actually surprised so many people were willing to talk to me wight he camera on them. It was really interesting seeing what their responses were though, and funny enough I got a lot of people who thought I was a fashion major which is kind of ironic seeing as though my outfit was hideous.

Sadie Soto

I decided to dress completely out of the ordinary. I put on random clothes and accessories that would normally not be placed together including 2 shirts, tights, leggings, boy’s gym shorts, one sock, a glove, a scarf, one bracelet, a bandanna, a snow boot, and a sandal. I even placed half my hair in a bun and the other half in a braid. I figured that by dressing so crazy, I would achieve more reactions from outsiders then by portraying a certain identity.

I received numerous looks that were often inquisitive and perplexed. Many people looked me up and down or even stared. I noticed that many students tried to avoid me either by putting in headphones or straying away from eye contact. Often times, people would say they had class or were too busy to answer my questions. Nevertheless, I did receive some answers. When asked what they thought my name was I received: “something with an S,” Megan, Anne, Sarah, and Leslie. As far as what people thought my major was I got answers such as art, human relations, theater, communications, and math.

Although I was really nervous for this activity and kept putting it off, I feel that I was actually able to grow through this counterfactual identity. Normally I am not one to approach people and ask questions. In fact, I would probably have been too embarrassed to even wear this outfit in public if it was not for this project. However, I was able to get out of my comfort zone and branch out which is really cool.

Kate Brogan

For her CFID outfit Kate decided to go to her first ever EDM (Electronic Dance Music) show and try to look the part.

What I usually look like: T-shirt, barely any make-up, and hair in a ponytail.

This change definitely made people react to me different; I think in a better way. My outfit made me look like I had a lot of confidence and I truly belonged with that group of people, which was my intention when I changed my “identity.”

Jessica Garnett

Jess decided to turn up the volume with a hot pink wig and a tight dress. She met people on 2nd Street in Belmont Shore. A lot of peeps thought she was a Fashion or Comm major. Nobody thought she studied Math or Science. Some asked if she even went to college at all. Jess had a great time with this activity and wants to do it again, just for fun.

Sami Focarino

Sami decided to try something 180° from Jessica. As she put it,

I can get pretty crazy with my outfits. So for this project I decided to wear something I would NEVER wear out of the house: sweatpants! I am not the type of person to ever go out of the house in sweats. I am a dress to impress, you never know who you’re going to meet kind of gal. So, I wore sweats, an oversized t-shirt, and no shoes. Ew, I know. But I did it.

A number of you tried to talk to people who didn’t really want to talk to you. Sometimes because you looked a little different, or perhaps because they were just in a hurry. Ricki looked great and I was surprised that so many peeps were too busy to talk to her. We the CSULB Campus were pretty inconsiderate of Ricki which really surprised me and made me a bit sad. But Sami’s sweatpants project got the opposite reaction:

With this outfit I was really expecting people to completely ignore me, turn or even run away. But what I got was much different! I had people coming up to me asking if I needed help! This project restored my faith in humanity. It was amazing how many people wanted to be so generous. Someone even asked me if I needed a place to stay that night! I think this all happened because I was a girl. If my brother did this project, I do not think he would’ve received the same reactions. Overall, this was an amazing experience for me.

Drew Jimenez

Drew decided that where he went was even more important that how he looked. His plan was to put together what for him would be an offbeat look, go interact with some people at Starbucks, and then get out before someone photographed him and turned him into an Internet Meme.

When I ordered my drink the barista asked me what my name was; so I told her to guess. I did not even see the name till after which I thought was kind of funny. She guessed I was a music major at Cerritos College. Probably because I was a couple pieces of jewelry away from looking like a hip hop mogul.

Shivam Mehta

I decided to wear something not too crazy but just something that wasn’t me. At first I was a little self-conscious but with time I started feeling comfortable. I decided to go to the mall. I wore sunglasses, with plugs in my ears. I asked people what they thought my name was and I got all sorts of different names. The funny thing was that not one person guessed my ethnicity right in this outfit. I also I asked them what they thought my major was and a few people said Psychology. As I approached them a few people asked, “are you doing a YouTube video?”

Good Job!

Four years. You’re probably afraid to even count how many thousands of hours and thousands of dollars. You’ve done the work. You’ve learned. You’ve achieved. You’ve shown your work. Finally the day comes: you put on a robe, sit in the campus mall with your classmates, and listen to speeches as thousands of family and friends look on. And then it happens: your name is called, you walk onto the stage, the president shakes your hand…

Sort of…

Unfortunately as you walk off the stage we Google your name and discover that you don’t have half the “Internet Resume” as some guy who never even went to college.

After all that work, Did you forget to tell The Internet?

There’s a world of curators, collectors, and ordinary citizens who might be interested in your work. Don’t keep it a secret.

SEO Artists’ Portfolios

In this workshop we’ll look at the current search results for your name, your online presence, start or develop your website, and work toward a richer, higher ranking set of search results for your name.

Free Workshop
Leader: Glenn Zucman
Time: 10a – 1p Friday May 3
Place: FA4-108A, School of Art, CSULB
Bring: Your Laptop & power cord

• More Info: mixedreality.me/tag/artists-portfolio
• Free Registration: Eventbrite