Dennis Dunleavy

A web of relentless creativity

This blog has suffered in recent months due to the fact that all the free time seems to have been sucked out of the schedule.

Recently, we have been at work designing and implementing a new series of courses at Southern Oregon University called Digital Media Foundations. The inspiration for the project came at a time when the university was wrestling with a $4 million budget deficit. People were being laid off and academic programs cut.

During this period, fortunately, opportunities to reorganize some of our programs also came up. With all the turmoil going on, a few instructors and very supportive deans decided to look into ways of optimizing learning experiences offered to students, especially in the areas of digital art, visual journalism, video production, and web design.

We started out by counting how many courses across disciplines teach pretty much the same things such as digital software applications, digital photography, and digital video. It was actually surprising to see so much overlap in content across the curriculum. The idea wasn't to replace existing courses, but to collaborate on integrative ways of teaching digital and technological skills to incoming students.

After months of meetings, the first of the DMF sequence of courses got off the ground.  With four instructors lecturing and working in labs, students are being exposed to thinking through the language of our increasingly digitally-based visual world. In other words, the course explores some of the fundamentals of visual narrative, design, and critical thinking about the creation and consumption of visuals in a digital age.

A digital doodle by Miles Inada introduces students to hues,
values, and saturation.

Interestingly, the biggest challenges have not been in designing curriculum or working with students, but in helping the administration and other faculty to realize the value of an interdisciplinary approach to teaching digital and technological literacy. Despite the perception that learning institutions are often called progressive places, the speed at which change can occur seems to frustrate a lot of people. Fortunately, when momentum and timing is on your side opportunities present themselves in surprising ways.

The first digital photography assignment, called Alphabet Soup,
helps students understand composition as well as resolution
and compression issues in a digital environment.

What's so shocking about the truth?

At the height of fashion week in Milan, Italy this week a billboard showing the naked 68-pound anorexic French actress Isabelle Caro is causing a visual shock. The campaign is creating a stir in the fashion industry, but designers take issue with the advertisement -- one that links the disease to the fashion industry.

Oliviero Toscani, famous for his controversial Benetton campaigns, created the images for No-Lita - No Anorexia.

Credit: NoLita

There should be little question as to the power of the image to construct imagined and ideal realities. The truth, however, is that the fashion industry with its emphasis on "thinness" as an ideal for young women must come to terms with its role in creating a cultural pathology that may lead to disease and death. In the No Anorexia campaign, the visual shock that comes with  the explicitness of the photographs signifies an attempt to bring into focus a culture of consumption and objectification.

Susie Orbach in her blog comments:

Bodies today are rarely where we live from. They become our production. Our personal statement about who we are. We work on them. We spend a fortune on them. We decorate, transform and manipulate them. Cosmetic surgery is worth $14 billion this year, and expected to increase by a $1 billion for next. The number of girls and women (and increasingly men) who suffer with severe eating and body difficulties, sometimes obvious like bulimia and obesity, sometimes hidden in bulimia or binge eating, is rising and reaching into earlier and earlier age groups.

Creativity Happens

It's 7 p.m. and time to draw on the windows with a marker. That's what a 2-year-old child thinks. Notes to self -- take bubble bath, draw on the windows, grab a bottle and hit the sack. Great. I love this picture because it has an intensity and feeling of curiosity I often see but rarely capture. Children are always creating. At some point, as adults, we struggle with this natural tendency -- we start thinking that if we can't do something really well,  we just don't bother with it at all.

Aye, Aye, AyePhone: The price of early adoption?

Sophie is getting the shopping thing down these days -- the cultivation of consumer culture in action. She asked me to put her little shopping cart in the car today when I told her we had to go to the store.

There are a lot of inferior qualities of using the iPhone, but the spontaneity, convenience, and ease of grabbing a moment is pretty attractive. Looks like Steve Jobs got an hear full after announcing that Apple would be cutting the cost of the phone just two months after its release.

Early adopters always pay the biggest bite for new technology, especially when the hype surrounding a product is so pervasive. Think of all those folks waiting in line to buy an iPhone on the first day of its release only to find out that two months later the price would drop nearly $200. Kind of makes people look a bit foolish, including Jobs.

What Jobs has figured out is that there is a huge difference between wanting and needing something. Apple leads the way in making people want stuff, especially iStuff. The iPhone is no exception, because with it we can basically go around  creating social documents of our lives in the first part of the 21st century, doing what the Polaroid had done for our parents generation. The thing is that our parents couldn't email the moment around the world in seconds and been seen by so many so quickly. It's the quirkiness of our techno-consumer culture. 

The "Eye Phone": Changing the way we see?

We've have come a long way in photography since the days of hauling around several clunky Nikon bodies and a gazillion lenses. Everything about using the iPhone indicates that designers are figuring out ways to tap into the experience of seeing. Designers know that we are all children at heart and the closer technology plays into our senses and experiences, the more effective the design will be.

The iPhone, or in this case the "eye phone", allows those of us who are serious about photography to lighten up a bit. Sure there are issues with the technology, but there is something else at work here beyond the limitations of focal length and white balance.

In a sense, the camera phone is changing the way people see and experience seeing the world in new and exciting ways. Seeing is becoming an experience now -- the results are so immediate, and for the most part pleasing -- that we can not escape how the capturing of images has morphed into an extension of ourselves. We no longer just make pictures to capture a moment that is personally important for us to remember, we are making pictures because the camera makes it so much more enjoyable and easier to do so.

Revolutionary?

In some ways, yes, because the way we see is being driven by the way in which we interact with the technology.