Media Activism with The Revolutionary Party, at the Walker Art Center
June 20 - 25, 2005.
This workshop focused on "the media" and teens; how it affects them, how it works, and how they can participate. Over the duration of five classes and one saturday afternoon presentation, 17 teens discussed the methodologies of media on both a cultural and technical level. The workshop was a quickie how-to for teens, a group typically left without a voice into the media stream, can challenge assumptions about themselves and others.
Day One: Ice Breaker
Teens participated in a round-robin type exercise to introduce themselves to the rest of the group. Each person answered a series of fill-in-the-blank questions while being video taped. Without editing, the tapes were played back for the entire class. This served as a great community building exercise and an introduction into video technology.
We also gave the participants our check this shit out list at the end of class on this day. We hoped it would serve as a reference of useful websites, news outlets, books and other handy things throughout the class and beyond. You can use it too.
Day Two: Anti-mercials
We see commercials on TV nearly every day. Commercials have grown increasingly sophisticated over the years, both in aesthetics and message. The basic
function remains the same, however: sell something. We gave the teens a collection of commercials collected from recent broadcast television and asked them
to remix the message of commercials into something else. Below are two examples of anti-mercials teens created:
»What can an oil company do for you? [QT 7, 1.5MB]
»Buy Everything [QT 7, 900KB]
Day Three: Secret Missives
What would you do if you found a note from someone you didn't know in a place you didn't expect? After this day's work, we hope some people found out. Exploring the city of Minneapolis, we made a series of notes with suggestions for people (e.g. ride a bike) or congratulations (e.g. thanks for riding your bike!) at various places throughout the city.
Day Four: Maybe We're Wrong (Interviews)
What do people think of other people? This is, of course, a vague and huge question, but something that we thought deserves consideration. Our teens were concerned that our society is often too quick to judge, and judge based on appearance alone. You could say it is a side effect of living in a heavily mediated environment. To test our hypothesis, and hopefully be surprised, we did a distributive interview process. We split the workshop up into four groups, each visiting a different coffee shop or other location with free WiFi. Each team interviewed someone with a specific set of questions. They then took a picture of the interviewee and sent it to another group. After that, they asked the same questions about another person based on pictures they received from another group. The goal with splitting up was to see how geographic differences would affect how people stereotyped one another.
Day Four: Maybe We're Wrong (Editing)
We worked on editing a movie based on the footage we collected on Day Four. Additionally, some participants prepared posters and other presentation material for the
presentation on Day Six.
A sample of the edited video can be found here:
»Maybe We're Wrong [QT7, 8MB]
Day Six: Final Presentation
We presented all of our movies to friends, family and even some of the interviewees in the Walker's 8th floor conference room. Additionally, we also hung a giant banner with the name of our film on the foot bridge over Hennepin Avenue. We hoped that it would serve both as a marker of our workshop but also as something people driving under would ponder for a moment. Maybe we are wrong.
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