Why the “G” in this GISP?

Whenever I talk about this course, people often ask why it occurred in group format, or what the benefits of that were. Why did eight students with different projects in different fields of study have to work together?

Before I continue on, the short answer to the above question is that they don’t – the projects themselves could certainly exist as independent studies, but they would then be fulfilling different goals than the ones we had.

It usually takes me a while to formulate a proper response, though, because my mental reaction involves flashes of so many thoughts and scenes. I think about post-critique debriefs, the critiques themselves, insightful discussion comments, scribbled notes posted around the room, impromptu suggestions. Because this GISP was more about the process of learning and making than about the short-term projects themselves, the way that unstructured time was spent became crucial. In our case, a lot of this time was spent using the group as a sounding board, finding common veins in our hang-ups and successes. Being able to compare our observations with those of seven different people was huge – I found that I had many blind spots in looking at myself and the world around me, and having these blind spots pointed out on a daily basis was a major component that shaped my project and working process.

By spending so much time together, we were able to critique aspects of each other’s work that often remain invisible under regular faculty or class guidance. We were invested in each other, accountable to each other, wanted to see each other succeed. Perhaps this was partially the product of the relationships we had going into the course, but I actually don’t think those initial relationships were necessary or hugely important. I had been familiar acquaintances or distant friends with many of the other students before entering the course, but the new relationships we built were based on things I had not and would not have learned through regular interaction alone. Before this, I had known these students by the products of their work and the public things they said – but now, I knew them by the different ways they thought, the origins of their motivations, and the things they taught me about creating, thinking, and connecting. All of this is what made the class more than just a project, because it can be carried on and applied to future endeavors as well.

-Janice

 

 

Final reflection: Janice

Initial Proposal

At the beginning of this course, I wrote that I was trying to understand principles underlying the types of communication that help increase the sense of salience and efficacy the general public feels with regard to climate change.

My goals were to:

• Understand influences on knowledge, concern, sense of efficacy, and action on climate change
• Identify relationships between these and other factors
• Make representations of these relationships, as well as examples of effective (and/or ineffective) communication
• Identify best practices and communicate them clearly to a defined audience

I also wrote that “I was drawn to this project topic by combination of personal values and interests, past experiences, and coursework. I’ve identified as an activist in various capacities while feeling uncomfortable with the term ‘environmentalist,’ explained and debated my choices with friends and family, spoken to hundreds of people who have different views than my own. I’ve consistently been drawn to communication work, if you would call it that: graphic design, literary arts, translation, tutoring, social psychology. I’m surrounded by people who care deeply about each other and the world around them, but in many circles I see bridgeable conflicts and difficulties in talking about difficult things. This is just one small piece of that puzzle, but it’s something I’m motivated to work on. Perhaps that gives my voice and investigation the weight of bias or ulterior motive, but they are ones that I am okay with acknowledging and working with.”

I will return to these goals and motivations after discussing my research and process in more detail.

Other Thoughts on Communication

I was talking to my grandpa not long before he passed away two days ago, but talking would perhaps be the wrong word. I could no longer recognize his voice over the phone, so my mother was holding the receiver, narrating back everything he said. “Tell him not to worry,” she pleaded, over and over. I tried to repeat the words, but I couldn’t, they sounded false. How was it that nineteen years of speaking my ancestral language still left me with no words to say to a family member as he lay dying? I didn’t know whether she really meant the words for herself, for me, or for all of us. In Chinese, “don’t worry” translates to “let go of the heart.” Is that something we can do?

Finally, after a long silence, I said the only words I knew I meant – “我爱你,老爷.” I love you.

A short pause, crackling, and then my mother’s voice, breaking. “He says he loves you too.”

That was the first, last, and only time that I’ve said those words to my grandfather. I felt almost ashamed that I had to stand there for almost a minute before mustering up the courage to say it – in Chinese, those are words I do not know by sound, not from granddaughter to grandfather or the other way around. I was afraid of being wrong – that somehow it wasn’t allowed, that someone would be offended. I’ve grown up, gone through school, went off to live in Rhode Island without ever being able to say that I really knew who this man was, this man who had held me when I was a year old and read me stories till I fell asleep and taught me poetry written a thousand years before this country was born.

But you know, I guess that’s enough. I love the grandfather I knew, and that is enough.

Week 3 Response: Janice

It’s amazing how fitting these readings seemed to be for where we are in the course, considering the fact that they were scheduled weeks ago. In Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, the author looks at what a series of well-known artists did when given the chance to access troves of technological resources via corporate partnerships. Irwin implies that many of those artists used the one or two months they had to produce “a short-term object, a large, winking, blinking version of what [they] were then doing.” These were compelling pieces, no doubt, but were they real steps forward in thought or process? The dissatisfaction of many of the participating artists suggests that they may not have been.

It’s hard not to draw a comparison between those month-long match-ups and our month-long course, although that comparison is perhaps a bit faulty because the former is a partnership between mature artists and scientists, while the latter is a partnership between different focus areas in our relatively immature minds.

“If you aren’t careful you’ll get exactly what you wanted” – this phrase that Daniel used in critique comes to mind when I think about the work described in the final artist-corporation collaboration exhibit. I don’t want to get exactly what I think I want; I want to get better at knowing why I want what I want, and better at revising my goals and processes as I continue growing and changing.

Week 1-2 Process: Janice

Before this GISP started, I spent a significant amount of time reviewing existing material on the psychological and societal factors influencing the impact of scientific communication. I intended to spend the first week mapping out my understanding of this, creating examples of the different factors so I could better understand them.

What happened instead at the first crit was that I was asked hard-to-answer questions about the values and assumptions that went into scoping out this project. Why do you care about this? Who is it for? Why do you sound so certain?

I’ve asked myself these questions before as well, but never so pointedly. As a result of this, I decided that it would be worth it to deviate a bit from my planned trajectory to investigate some of these questions. I started a running list of notes and questions, and from those I picked one per day to write on slips of paper to ask my peers. I collected the responses (and my own) until the end of the week, when I mapped out our collective answers to two questions: “What do you love about your life?” and “What are things that you fear?”

What I realized more concretely through this process was that none of us intrinsically need to be involved in fighting homelessness or inequality or climate change, but the values, loves, and fears we build up over a lifetime can spur us to action when something that is part of our identity is threatened. A vaguer connection can lead to concern, but one that is removed from a self-defense reaction – the “self” in this form of self-defense referring as much to our sense of self as it does to our bodies and futures.

In the United States, our national infrastructure means that many of us can continue to love our social relationships, our freedoms, our surroundings while remaining insulated from various impacts of climate change, war, and global inequality. It is often only when we make connections to the threats they place on the things we love that we begin to factor them into our decisions and daily lives. If looked at this way, it makes sense that it is incredibly easy for the most vulnerable to be harmed first, while the rest of a community remains unconcerned due to their structural and social surroundings, rather than their “moral inferiority.” I feel that forming these connections to values and people is much more important to developing individual, community, or global resilience than writing a narrative of who is right, and why – though the latter is one that is used very often in political or media analyses of global problems.

This is all part of very unscientific conjecture on my part, but it’s worth noting that personal examinations of experiences can be just as valuable as scientific ones (albeit in a different way, and at its best also informed by more rigorous study).

Interestingly enough, it seemed this exposure of our connections and my own telling of how I came to care so deeply about climate inaction and communicating difficult topics were the things that evoked the most emotional reaction and understanding from my classmates. I feel that personal narrative, told from a place of reflection rather than judgment, has the power to allow others to put themselves in our places and see how we came to have the views and values that we do.

____

This was my starting point for the second working week, but another comment from the second critique stuck in my mind – that I perhaps needed to incorporate more “fun” into my creative process. I was a bit confused by this, since the process of mapping and reflection was in itself a fun one for me (also I hadn’t yet spent much time on figuring out what form my output should take).

Though it’s a little absurd, I spent the first couple days after that critique asking myself, “What the hell does fun mean?” You know, thinking myself into circles that were pretty much the opposite of lightness or fun.

One thing that helped get me out of that was a collection of ideas from our reading by Csikszentmihalyi – although I had selected the chapter in the first place, it was only in rereading that I realized that the experience of flow was essentially my idea of “fun,” and that I couldn’t possibly experience it without first internalizing enough information from the domain of science communication to create without the interruptions of back-and-forth research. Considering that my interest in this field had arisen fairly recently from my academic and personal experiences, I suddenly felt a lot freer to go about my research/reflection/creation process without feeling that it should be coming more naturally. The “fun” occurs when I put in the work over time and piece things together, not when I try to force myself into it.

Week 2 Response: Janice

“Your Brain on Improv”

It’s fascinating how much we have to go through just to get some glimpses at where and how the brain might do some of its creative production. What caught my attention in this talk was not the discrepancy between the areas that ‘lit up’ under different conditions in an fMRI scan, but rather the creativity behind the experimental design itself. Limb may not be a professional jazz musician, but he’s put together some pretty impressive improvisational techniques of his own.

Apart from that, it’s not surprising to hear that areas related to self-monitoring become less active and areas related to self-expression become more active during jazz or rap improvisation (as compared to a control of playing a memorized piece, which can often become partially driven by ‘muscle memory’). In my limited experience with piano improvisation, self-monitoring or any mental activity that places the focus externally can easily interrupt the interplay of the mind and the music.

I’m also curious as to why the researcher chose to make improvisation an analogue for other forms of creativity – his final unanswered questions seem to imply that he feels the study of brain reactions during improvisation could potentially create opportunities to ‘teach’ creativity. I feel that creativity is very ill-defined in this research – is it the output of original material synthesized within the brain, is it the output of material judged by society to be new and valuable, is it…? While I may not be in a position of expertise, I do feel that the concept of creativity is too often mysticized. Looking at blood flow in the brain may be one way of attaching it to physical reality, but identifying and developing different forms of creativity has a social and experiential basis as well. Humans are incessantly forming new neural connections, but they are also constantly seeking to fall back on old, efficient patterns. It may take a combination of scientific insight and self-awareness to understand the personal conditions that facilitate the formation of new patterns, and it is up to the individual and surrounding society to recognize which of those types of new patterns are most important to each of them.

“Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable”

This article is the first I’ve read in a long time that has left me with a deeper sense of hope and peace. The idea that optimism and despair are both forms of certainty, but hope is an acknowledgement of uncertainty, is one that appeals to me (though it’s a statement that could use some qualifiers). We spend a lot of time trying to imagine our futures, or put a “visible shell around our souls” – amidst all that, there is a comfort in acknowledging that the inexplicable and unpredictable will always remain, and that that is okay.

Humanity is what we do in the face of uncertainty – there’s a wisp of a thought, and one of many overlapping possibilities.

The following passage (quoted from Woolf) caught my attention:

“Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of the woman writer. The Angel was dead, what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and common object – a young woman in her bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is ‘herself’? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know.”

It was so refreshing to hear those last two sentences – in a couple lines, they lifted the pressure of needing to pin a definition or declaration on every action, every piece of self. The combined weight of our tags and crystallizations can provide a reassuring pressure, but they also make our movements restricted and labored. I don’t think it’s necessary to remove all those thought-constraints that make ourselves feel more solid, but it helped me to remember that we place them there to improve our own security, and that we can also lift and shape them, or flow out of them.

And a segue from that flow:

“Her demands for liberation for women were not merely so that they could do some of the institutional things men did (and women do now, too), but to have full freedom to roam, geographically and imaginatively.”

Woolf’s expanded definition of liberation was so simple, but it still gave me a bit of a mental shock nearly a century after she first wrote it. I know how to fight for institutional rights, but I don’t know where to find the gatekeeper for imaginative roaming. I actually think that my own interpretations of societal and personal restrictions form those walls – and that makes them harder than anything to tear down. Asking for that type of liberation is like asking to be freed from evolutionary and societal pressures, something that remains radical in any age (except perhaps to children, before they fully understand or internalize the latter).

This class is a group of eight women with a “room of our own,” and freedom to roam, but I’ve watched myself and my companions exposed to that freedom, and we’re terrified. We feel guilt, anxiety, a thousand other things. Many of us have been prompted in critique to step back, to try to “do nothing,” to siphon a little from that internal stream of thoughts and feelings – and many of us have encountered unsympathetic mental gatekeepers. In context of a lifetime, it is nothing to spend a week outside of our intentions, but what struck me is that we don’t even know how to do it. We want “focused roaming,” a paradoxical state; we want to be set free so that we can get as quickly as possible to the next station, the next product, the next goal. True imaginative liberation has led to many unintended insights (that in a more focused time can be directed toward goals), but conflicted and tentative pacing seems to lead mainly to mental anguish.

I feel oddly at peace writing this  – perhaps the interpretation isn’t one Woolf intended, but I got something out of thinking those thoughts and writing those words. The not-knowing is okay because we have the freedom to create our own paths within it.

Week 1 Process: Janice

To contrast with my relatively long and meandering reflection post, here’s a list of things I learned this past week:

• I work better on paper than on the computer, because I feel like I have more permission to make mistakes and write things I’m not sure of yet.
• Some ideas don’t grow until they have dedicated space and time.
• Having the implicit support of others (and being accountable to them) makes me more motivated.
• I have often pressured myself to get ahead of deadlines, with varying degrees of success – it’s very satisfying to be able to give the foundational steps their due.
• I don’t know all the experiences, assumptions, and values that led me to pursue my current project, and would like to examine those more closely.
• I like creating systems of steps to follow, but sometimes their order is based more on gut feeling than reason – is this always a problem?
• I have difficulty prioritizing things without writing them down.
• I may not have answers to many of my questions at the end of this class, after five years, or after fifty, because they will keep changing – but I am able to improve my ability to act and create with what I do know.
• Uncertainty is okay.

Week 1 Response: Janice

I felt that what these readings have in common is that they provide us with frameworks for thinking about the ways and whys of how we assimilate information, form mental connections, and create new content.

In his two-system framework, Daniel Kahneman provides a very straightforward way of visualizing the push and pull of our internal gut reactions (“system 1”) and our efforts to regulate the thoughts that proceed from those reactions (“system 2”).

On the other hand, in the first chapter of The Psychology of Writing, Ronald Kellogg describes what seems like a more complex (but also more arbitrary) system of categorizing forms of thought and output by their motivations, goals, processes, and reproducibility. While I don’t agree entirely with some of the parameters he used to slice and dice our forms of creativity – “process” and “product” creativity, for example, seem divided more by the external context in which they occur than by the internal routes taken to achieve them – I did find myself trying to come up with examples of how my thinking fit into or moved between different categories, and how they came together in a working process.

It made sense to me that undirected thought (system 1) might be shaped by more goal-oriented thought processes (system 2), or that recurrent thought or questioning (a strange category in itself) might provoke investigation. At the same time, the idea that “the overriding criterion in creative thinking is meaningfulness, whereas in critical thinking it is truth,” is an odd one to me. The creation of new neural connection or new meaning seems to be one of the prerequisites of creative thinking and can be judged relative to the preexisting state of a person, but truth seems to be a more slippery criterion. Rationality or reason might be more easily evaluated in context of critical thinking and the facts available to a person. However, semantics aside, I do think that Kellogg’s description implies a divergent and individualistic nature of creative thinking, in contrast with a convergent potential for critical thinking when applied to a limited set of facts.

To go off track for a moment – it’s hard for me to tell whether I’m engaged more in critical or creative thinking when writing a reflection like this one, because we are taught that critical thinking involves synthesis, yet synthesis most often serves to create new connections or meanings. Perhaps it is inaccurate to depict these as wholly separate realms of thought, because our mind functions in a fluid way that is constantly shifting between being “creative” and reactive, even when in search of a unifying, reasoned idea.

I found Bronowski’s article (The Creative Process) to be full of controversial assertions that may not have been as controversial at the time of their writing, in 1977. I feel that we now have a more nuanced understanding of where humans might fall on a continuum of animal behavior, that we no longer make such a hard distinction between craft and art, at least with respect to entire countries. Would a modern scientist make the same overwhelming generalization in defining all India and the Middle East as “craftsmanlike,” unworthy of being compared to Ancient Greece or Renaissance Europe?

During our discussion, the often-repeated question of defining art arose from this – does it matter to us how hard the parameters are, does it need to happen at all? My personal answer lies in the fact that the same work can be defined in various ways by its creator, the culture in which it is created, other cultures, and cultures of time periods to come. It is enough for me to say that, in my current time and context, I am creating a piece of work with or without artistic intent, for a self-defined purpose. If it comes to have different interpretations or uses among a wider audience or in a dozen years, these are developments that I can choose to react to or ignore, depending on my goals. It is not important to me that I make “art,” but rather that I strengthen my connections with the world around me by creating meaning, or relationships, or utility.

This brings in, as well, one facet of the theory of cultural evolution – that humanity evolves not only through the reproductive fitness of individuals in relation to their environments, but also through the influence of transferable cultural developments that change what is required of our bodies and minds. I feel that much of our startling adaptability as a species comes from our well-developed capacity for forming relationships and using those relationships to retain information from generation to generation. Much of what we use to survive or thrive today was rooted in things that were learned, discovered, and created by millennia of our predecessors. Among other things, these culturally preserved developments allow societies to dedicate more and more of their time to pursuits outside of survival and reproduction, especially as much of the information becomes retained in forms outside of the human mind and voice. To varying degrees, individuals are able to use their desire for connection and meaning to create different products with different ends, or to turn communication toward culturally significant (but non-survival) ends. It is possible that art as we know it is one of the things that has slowly arisen as a result of this – first enmeshed with the necessities of survival, and later differentiated as the complexity of societies and their differentiation of labor increased.

In this context, it’s interesting and somewhat ironic that some among us have turned that chief “luxury” or art into a way of making a small, individual attempt at ensuring our survival as a species. As our influence expands to truly touch every corner of the globe, our capacity to upset the systems we depend on increases (as does our capacity to change those systems, but to what degree and with what result is not always known). The awareness of this is not something we are well-equipped evolutionarily to deal with – we are better at being reactive than proactive, better at dealing with the present than the future. Some individuals respond to this awareness with communicative, creative, and investigative efforts in the arts, humanities, sciences – attempts at scaling up positive impacts, amplifying or intensifying voices, or uniting a diverse global community that first began in small, fairly homogenous tribes.