Alternative Approaches to Representing Knowledge in the Human Environment
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Digital Reality and the Perception of Self
Presentation Title:
- Alternative Approaches to Representing Knowledge in the Human Environment
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
How is knowledge represented in the media and the physical environments that surrounding us? What messages are best funded, most promoted, or presented in the most sophisticated ways? Which ideas become culturally resonant and affective? The impact of our knowledge environments is coming to the surface as economies become increasingly information-driven and as facing our global challenges relies on informing political will with good data and analysis. On another scale, there are implications for the personal relationships to knowledge that drive life choices made by individuals. A transdisciplinary approach is suggested to reinvent our knowledge environments to best serve both individual and societal aspirations. This paper will share findings and perspectives, generated over ten years of research to discover new possibilities in this area.
A working partnership between the US-based Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and InfoCulture, a media research and development studio has produced promising results with an approach that leverages some timeless qualities of art (i.e., the use of metaphor, ambiguity, story and other ways of making meaning out of raw information) to re-imagine non-fiction communication in a variety of venues and using a range of technologies. These efforts can be differentiated from trends in activist and relational art practice in that their impacts are measured using sophisticated quantitative and qualitative methods—often contributing to new thinking in those science domains. Findings suggest that discourse, informed by approaches that originated in the arts and the social sciences, and which takes form in combinations of both new and old media and communication technologies, has the potential to increase people’s engagement with knowledge that holds value for them. Projects to be discussed include: a feature film that used public sculpture practice to create metaphors for science-based ideas about what produces wellbeing; a social network that used films created by a collaboration between adolescent and professional filmmakers to drive conversation about what young people think helps them engage in learning (or not); a health blog that quickly built membership by telling stories that revealed the cultural conflicts inherent in discussions about health.
