Lessons Learned re: Artist Statements and HS Students during 10 years of Digital Day Camp

Digital Day Camp

One of the many things learned during the 10 years doing this program for high school-age students was the art (and by that I mean...how very difficult it is!) to work with students to write artist statements.

My last two years:

DDC 2007-Public interventions

DDC 2008-Fake vs. Real

2007:

Bold/individual (could not work in groups!) projects and very engaged students.

Project samples: Shavanna (domestic abuse), Jessenia (abuse of animals), Glenn (gang violence), Jose (subway niceties).

Important:

Do you get the project? Where they were coming from? Do you understand the gesture? Was it in their voice?

How did we do the writing:

• Provided guiding questions--always with a focus on the process (who are you? what did this project mean to you? why? how did you make it: technology, influences from program? what did you need to learn in order to develop the project? who helped you?).
• We left them to write and then went around and helped them as they wrote (cleaning up mostly spelling, grammar, sentence structure).
• I would always read their statements aloud to them, so they could hear their own words, and at times, make corrections on their own.
• We never took statements away to review or edit and hand back with red ink marks. We always did the editing with the students, so we had their permission and they were part of the process. I wanted them to understand the changes.
• We talked about the difference between spoken and written language, and how they needed to not take anything for granted. They shouldn't expect that their audience knows anything about their project or process.
• Find common language. "Process" wasn't really a part of my students' vocabulary, which took me a while to understand. 'How did you get from point A to point B' worked.
• Focus: presenting their work to the world.

2008:

These students were not writers.

We did an exercise to get the students thinking and writing creatively:

Instant Story Exercise with Christina Kral

The goal of this exercise was to allow for a different reality, and give the participants the most absurd and abstract stories by the act of listening, looking and documenting images and sounds from the public.

On Monday, July 21, 2008 the Digital Day Camp participants, divided into their assigned project groups and walked to a nearby park on 10^th Ave. and 22^nd Street. While one group would go out and shoot photographs, the other two groups would catch phrases of passers-by and write them down.

After each group had their turn taking pictures and collecting sound bites from the public they encountered and/or engaged, they returned to the Eyebeam Education Lab. Once in the lab, the three groups printed their photos, and were instructed to arrange the visual and written materials to form an abstract story with ONLY their photographs to illustrate and complete a narrative, thought or viewpoint

After 10 years, we finally developed an artist and project statement templat

[ARTIST STATEMENT TEMPLATE]:

Tell us about your world.

How did you think of this world?

What were the technologies, tools, resources and influences (for example: guest lecturers, teaching artists, work you saw during the program or before) that you used to make this world?

What are your group members’ names?

[PROJECT DESCRIPTION TEMPLATE]:

World description/narrative:

What is the name of your world?

What is your world?

Where is it?

What’s the point of it? Why does it exist?

What happens there?

How does one get there?