New Literacies
Why do we make art? In these environmentally and socially challenging times, creativity is no longer a luxury, limited to professionals. I am a firm believer of arts for social change, but I am concerned that art-based approaches have not yet made their mark in mainstream problem-solving and planning. One reason is that non-arts professionals often underrate the practical value of the arts. Often there is no artist at the table. The devaluing of artistic creation is particularly problematic for young people who need to develop both hard and soft skills to prepare to play their roles in the contemporary world. And it is vital for all of us to become adept at creatively navigating newly emerging modes of communication by developing new literacies. In the face of a deadly pandemic and an even more deadly climate emergency, it is vital to learn skills that enrich our perceptual and creative repertoires. And it is equally vital to establish networks of collaboration that stretch beyond the artificial barriers that divide people by age, profession, and ethnicity, barriers that the arts are especially equipped to cross.
My own non-profit initiative, Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society, has been rediscovering and promoting social opportunities for artistic production rooted in intergenerational learning. We provide older adults with creative means (e.g., visual art, storytelling, music, movement, digital media, etc) to co-create artwork with younger people. We work in multimodal ways, ranging across the visual, oral, corporeal, musical, and spatial.
Our recent Multiliteracies project serves as an apropos case study for connecting art making with these new literacies. As a key part of the Multiliteracies project, MemoryGami is a hybrid digital/paper method of storytelling integrating the art of folding paper with stories from the lives of older adults. Six older women (myself included) participated in producing autobiographical artwork though representational tasks. We started by developing a personal story, represented that story in a physical medium (i.e., a small folding book enriched with origami inserts), then focused on how that medium allowed representation of the story. We subsequently worked in-pairs with summer youth interns to produce second-level digital representations, based on the folded paper, that reflected on the relationship between story and tools.
We have launched a public exhibition to showcase the digital representations and the MemoryGami books through our partnership with the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre. We will also be using a social media platform — e.g., Youtube or Vimeo — to reach a wider audience.
The process of reflection is as deeply valuable as the artistic production itself. Accordingly, after the production phase was complete, I informally interviewed each woman, asking the following questions: 1) What does your MemoryGami mean to you now? 2) What process(es) did you enjoy most, and why? (E.g., generating the narrative, creating a folding book, making/learning origami, video capture and editing, seeing the final cut, planning the public exhibition, etc.) 3) Post creation, what new insights have you gained about yourself? 4) As an artist/storyteller, how do you want the audience of the video or exhibition to respond to your artwork? 5) Is there anything else you want to add (E.g., more ideas about new modes of storytelling)? I also, of course, posed these questions to myself. My answers were illuminating.
Concerning how making art informs the maker, I want to share the Zen word, “冷暖自知 (“Reidanjichi)”, which inspired the Multiliteracies project. “Reidanjichi” refers to the kind of spiritual enlightenment that is not learned from another person, but must be mastered by oneself through personal experience, like drinking water and sensing whether it is cold or hot. Sharpening our five senses is, in this context, at the core of acquiring those external, multimodal representations in sense making that we refer to as multiliteracies. That is why I often participate in my projects as both instigator and participant.
Whether one considers our MemoryGami digital production as art or as a means to literacy, the concept of “representation” sits at the core of its practices. New literacies learning is defined by New London Group, who coined the term Multiliteracies in the mid 1990s, as developing “understanding and competent control of the representational forms that are becoming increasingly significant in the overall communications environment” (p. 61).
In cognitive science, the ability to construct an external representation of a complex idea is the marker of intelligence across disciplines. Don Norman, a cognitive scientist, described abstraction and representation as the engines of cognition:
The ability to represent perceptions, experiences, and thoughts in some medium other than that in which they have occurred, abstracted away from irrelevant details. This is the essence of intelligence, for if the representation and the process are just right, then new experiences, insights and creations can emerge. (Things That Make Us Smart, p. 47)
Summoning abstraction and representation, MemoryGami involves accessing and processing our memories through sensory-based intervention — paper folding. It helps seniors and non-native English speakers to effectively express because it does not rely solely on left-brain linguistic functions to process predominantly right-brain experiences. Instead, people can represent personal experiences non-verbally, accessing sensory memories of emotional experiences. It was not a coincidence that I chose my childhood memory of drinking green tea with my beloved grandmother as my story.
For me, the representational process was intuitive and collaborative, born from long gestation. Although I am a non-native speaker and struggle to articulate my aesthetic needs, I started with writing. Perhaps I am not yet sufficiently multiliterate. At any rate, I first wrote an essay in English, then distilled it into a poem, then transitioned to paper folding and book making. The initial step, writing, was limiting for me. In Japanese, we often freely coin new onomatopoetic words to express felt experiences or emotional feelings. In English, I wrote, “I am gazing into a floating tea stick in my cup,” which fails to capture the state of a tea stick. So I decided to rewrite the poem in Japanese, which somehow felt less multicultural to me, and therefore less legitimate. But in Japanese, I felt free to invent the onomatopoetic construction, “ゆらゆら（yu-ra-yu-ra)”, to describe the way the tea stick floated, which I could not do in English. It felt right.
During filming for the digital storytelling, I had delightful and provocative conversations about this linguistic leap with my summer filming intern, Inanna, who skillfully and collaboratively made many representational decisions. She came up with the idea of taking a large fallen Magnolia leaf and letting it float in a swimming pool. We ended up placing my origami flower on top of the leaf, so they floated together as a metaphor, while I was narrating that particular line of the poem. This active collaboration increased my sense of agency. Watching the Magnolia leaf carrying the soft, permeable origami flower, floating unpredictably, we held our breath, mesmerized by its grace. We re-shot the scene over a dozen times, followed by the simple act of pouring tea, spending half a day just quietly filming. The more I performed the bodily movements of tea serving, the more I noticed my breathing, cutaneous sensation, and our surroundings. For a while, I transcended time, place, and language. For me, art-based learning requires this kind of relationship building and reflective practice. I thanked Inanna for holding the safe space together.
Similar to my experience, the other participating women found that MemoryGami engaged their intellectual, affective, sensory, and kinaesthetic faculties; enhanced their creative, metaphoric thinking; and promoted collaborative, intergenerational dialogue. It also helped start to build artistic/social networks for them, which can be a very useful remedy for social isolation. Moreover, it helped improve their communication skills — the new literacies-, which will be increasingly important in the coming years. So, why do we make art? Perhaps, instead, we should ask why do we refrain from making art?
