In Years To Come

*part of series of writing (end)

This will be the last part of my series of writing. Let's continue the topics upon literacy, and how can we get literated in the relevancy of our society, of the zeitgeist and mainstream? How can it be done? All in all, it was the means of every education in this world. Schools and teachers alike, tried their best to transferring their knowledge so that the students can pass it beyond than just some paperwork for the thesis or exam sheets in standardized test. So that the student may get the proper literacy to face the real world. Yet, nothing in the classroom had prepared us to face what's outside the school wall, not while the students knew school only for the homework and lab experiment, without ever facing the actual battlefield.

An art student who master in traditional paintings, graduated as the brightest pupil in his year. He may be appreciated best in his field, but now that he went out of his school wall and seeing the real world with his own two eyes, he saw people no longer interested in traditional painting. No art gallery hung up classic canvas in beautiful frame on their walls anymore, everything went digital. Oil colors replaced by Photoshop palette, while charcoal pencil replaced by vector tool. The art student, who master only traditional ways, now became confused. The times they are a changing. He drowned and sink deep in this digital sea.

In years to come, everything will be shift. Directions had been set from years ago. Our entire life had been mapped from the beginning, and it's time to draw some lines upon the paper so that the dots will be connected and the larger image appeared. The topography map had been laid out in front of our eyes, yet still we always failed to read it. And usually, the reason was because many people failed to see beyond the maps. What they knew was that the topography map was fixed, while in reality it was fluid and constantly changing according to the architect's hands who drawn it. Graduate education doesn't guarantee anything except 'learning about', and when they proceeds to the real world, that's when the 'learning to be' took place. But that doesn't mean we can't accelerate the pace, we can. My friend the pianist had 'learning to be' a musician ever since she was a child, and so do I. When talking about dedication and passion, it's not about apprentice and master, or newbie and expert, it's about curiousity. The will to explore and dig in further.

Nowadays, information are easily accessible. Social media had extensively grown and keep grown each day, it provides not only a large amount of learning places, it also means the expansion of access. Yes, access so that we can meet a variety of people, communities and society who had distinct understanding of knowledge. And what good does meeting with those people would do? It good to expanding our already established knowledge, add it up with new information, filtering out the unnecessary ones. Frankly, school curriculum had also tried these attempts, by committing students to learning many subject at a time: remember the day when we taught of chemistry, physics, sociology and art in one day? That was the day when the information crammed up inside us, attempts should not be given repeatedly without any good quality times to reflect back upon them. Repeated attempts tend to fall into routines, which iron out the improvisation and exploration.

From the visual media examines to the philosophy of life, I hope you can extract something out of these writings. I'm. Just. Hoping.

 

 

AFTERWORDS

But that was merely the tip of the iceberg, many can be pointed out as flaws in our education, cultural and social environment--but we won't go further into the subject of school and means of education, let's stay on the track--I'm deeply sorry if my writings here tend to overlook human as 'information sponges' who have the absorptive capacity, I may overgeneralized, at least from my point of view as a quick learner (I easily understand many things). Thanks for reading.

Million Little Gods

*part of series of writing

Notice how far we've come from the first idea of visual media to the shaping of identity, but somehow if you managed the thin red line among these writings, you'll get it (after all, it was all about 'information' and 'knowledge', let's see if you can extract something out of it. Haha) Now, let's continue the latest topic about identity, now we shift a bit to the means of information transfer, and how can we conduct it to be knowledge. 
I'll talk about the 'tacit knowledge' that came after a mastering--an intuitive insight that came without any external physical stuff.

An example, I know a named photographer who were able to distinguish a 'fake' photograph from 'natural' one. That means, he knew exactly, if the scene freezed in the photo was naturally taken (that is by perfect timing, almost accidentally), or whether it was staged and arranged before (i.e the scene was prepared before), though from different perspective, I should said from 'common' eyes, there was no discernible difference. How did he got those ability? Magic? Sixth-sense metaphysics ability? No. Big no. He learnt it from practices. Hours of practices. Years of practices. It was something (apart from that it was logically correct) that was taken as being non-sense for most people, particularly in the rigid environment such as school or university. (Again, I talked about it. Hahaha) People usually rejects the intuitive reasoning, for they can't see where it comes from. Yeah, honestly , it come from a very, very logical event named PROCESS. The fact that people didn't see the process (of how my friend the pianist in the last chapter learning about music theory, or me examining Batman's detail) made them became unbeliever.  All and all, the intuitive reasoning I talked about can be called as literacy—albeit in the particular photographer, it was a miraculous one—but I guess everyone had their own literacy, at least in their own field.

Literacy is one thing that commonly forgotten in the society, for instance, despite of how many you knew about Shakespeare, and years you spent on learning his poems, how could you talked about Shakespeare among the people who were trained to determine standard error in statistics? No matter how hard you pushed them to swallow the info about Shakespeare, they won't understand it deeply, they won't be as good as you--the one who had great literacy in Shakespearean stuff. A photographer won't fit in the room full of business officer, for even though they can communicate each other, there'll be no meanings transferred, if both party didn't have literacy in each dimensions of understanding.

And speaking of literacy, it associated deeply with identity. Like in the second part of this writing, knowledge is usually attributed to a particular person. A practitioner. I could talk hours and hours with my friend a moviegoer, for both of us had literacy in it. For years we've read about movie books, we watch tons of movie, we knew the differences between an IMAX camera and the usual 35mm, for we--albeit so little--have plunged ourselves to the literal world of movies and films. The fact that we only 'know about' movie, sometimes could bloom into 'know how', maybe sometimes any of me or my friend would make our own movie, who knows what'll happen when you have those commitment and passion?
Yet the fact that literacy--sprung from love and passion of particular subject(s)--can gave us identity can't be denied. I can easily point my finger to my friend the pianist whenever someone asked me, "Who's around here that knowing something about music?" or I can easily introduce my friend the moviegoer when someone asked anything about movie.

Does literacy means we had to be such an asshole who knew everything? To some extent, yes. At least know everything in your field. If you're a pianist, go get to know everything about piano and music. If you're an illustrator, eat and drink every information you know about illustration and drawings. The danger of possessing half-information could be dangerous, you might get wrong interpretation of it. As Abraham Maslow put it precisely, all of our entire life was endless learning. A lifelong education where everybody is forever teacher and forever pupil. You're going nowhere if you insist to play it by the book and according to the rule. Play both sides, inside and outside the book, so you might reflect back what've you done these whole times, so you might see the coordinates you mapped yourself and plan some new continuum along the straight lines of your Cartesian diagram of life. 

--TO BE CONTINUED--

They Who'll Give Us Name

*Part of series of writings

Bruner's distinction was highly relevant with today's world cultural climate and environment. The particular knowledge I'm talking about in the last part was referring to 'literacy' or 'prior knowledge' that was somehow tacit and intangible. Now, in this part we'll examine our first idea about visual media, and how these days we can't escape the visual regime, thus forced us to be informed and taught by them. To my generation, our entire life was shaped by them, it was the visual regime who determine the extent to which something will make meanings, and the extent to which those meanings will be taken seriously in society.

But where does information acquired from social media could took us? It depends on how we treat the incoming information, how we transfer them to ourselves and what can we make out of it. It's too true that our social surrounding promises, above all, the experience of meaningfulness. Any information gathered from our experience in social engagements, shaped us into who we are, but that doesn't mean they can give you any identity. Yes, identity, as without it, we'll be flushed away in this world of demands and harsh fact. And identity was shaped through the means of information gathering, processing (or make it into knowledge), or to be short: learning.
(Remember, by learning here, I don't assume something like 'education'--I wouldn't need to forced out this point so heavily of how that unenlightened teaching and training often pulls in the opposite direction, you can always read my rant in my other posts, hehe...) Learning and meanings, learning and identity, this sort of things were what will we discussed in this and next posts. Learning (that ended up in mastering), more than often--if it's not automatically--gave the practitioner an identity.

I have this one friend of mine who was identified as 'musician' among our friends, she was a pianist, and that social recognition given by the society for her amazing 'tacit knowledge' and ability in music, particularly the piano. The second example would be myself (hahaa) who was often identified among my friends as 'illustrator', 'designer' or anything that are related with visual art. One day, both of us (me and my friend the pianist), talked together. And from those talks, I recognized what Bruner's point in 'engage on activities' means. My friend talked heavily about how she shaped herself into an able pianist.

First, as an information gathering activities, she dived herself to musical theories, she submit herself to listened to many named composer and pianist, such as Rachmaninoff or Debussy, Bubi Chen or Herbie Hancock. These were taken as meaningful experiences for her, how she gather the information about music and musician, just the same as how I first interested in Herge's Tintin, Batman comics, or Disney's animation. I took them as information, I examined particular detail in Batman's shadowing, the dynamic movement in Tintin's comic panel, and/or coloring in Disney's animation. Our exploration, ended up in understanding, for we're not taking the information as something that was taken for granted. We consciously process them, not only remembering them.

The second part was meaning making, engage in the particular activity we loved to do. My friend, she then started to summon an instrument for herself: a piano. Learn to play it, compose a music out of it, practice it. The same as how I grab a pencil, make a doodle in my bedroom wall (and forced my father to repaint again and again the wall, haha, sorry dad!), before I start to moved on to paper. And what does the previous information gained for both of us? What good did music theories for my friend, and what good did shadowing and coloring did for me? It's good for expanding. Soon as my friend start to playing guitar and bass guitar, so do I can expand myself to oil paint and charcoal stick. For us, it's easy to move on from one instrument to another, for we're not taking it as our object of affection. We're not limiting ourselves to the instrument only, we learn the subject, and that's why the mediated tool never a problem for us--well, maybe there'll be a bit 'adaptation problem' at first, but as the proverb says, "these too will pass." Now that my friend can record himself in digital sound, transferred in PC speaker, so I can managed to handle Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. Instruments are not the great emphasize, like my first idea how physical product doesn't guarantee instant literacy, it only 'help' us, it doesn't ‘make’ us.

The third was mastering and social recognition. It required us not to became indulgent practitioner, we need to contribute in society. My friend, she commit herself to the church choir, a band and any zeitgeist that supports them, while I bring my illustration in printed shirt for an organization, publication posters or promotional video. This is where we got those recognition. We make some implications to society, give them something out of us. We can meet up the society demand, for we--with our extensive learning--are prepared with the supply. We can transformed the information we gather to something 'real'. It took us beyond theory and concepts (no matter how I loved them), and encourage us, knowing that we were able, to contribute in society.

 

--TO BE CONTINUED--