virtual social reality
Confused about the pixelation? It's not a compression error- rather, it was a deliberate choice made by the design studio called Department of Unusual Certanties, who produced the video in association with Humber Galleries. I volunteered alongside DoUC for this project known as "mAPPing the Territory," which involved numerous partners including Pathways to Education, MYseum Intersections, Humber Galleries, and the Rexdale Community Health Centre. In short, the project was an exploration into how youth engage with social media, and how they can begin to think critically about their virtual presence in relation to their physical and social reality.
Ultimately, the students learned a bit about UX, and created personae which they crafted elaborate location-based stories through apps like Google Maps, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. These social media posts and personae were then crafted by DoUC into a physical gallery exhibition hosted at The Humber Galleries space. My role in this project was twofold: I was one of a handful of Mentors who helped to guide the groups of students through the process of learning and crafting stories, and I was also part of the content production team which created the data visualization motion graphics that the exhibition consisted of.
takeaways
It was very interesting to see the kinds of stories and personae that were created in this project; there was something in the way that the personae that the youth created would inevitably end back up at Rexdale after a globe-trotting adventure. Below is one example of a persona that we developed into an exhibition piece to be projected onto a large theatre wall (which is why the animation is relatively flat). Another exemplar was James AKA Wonderpiece AKA Thundermonkey, a gender-fluid character who was born in Kenya, adopted and raised by somalian pirates, experiences the loss of his brother in a car crash, and ends up becoming a star soccer player to honor his dead brother.
I've had a bit of prior experience mentoring younger students before, but working with this particular group of students and seeing the kinds of values and interests they had being filtered through into the stories they crafted was a very unique and entertaining experience. Additionally, working with all the different partners involved in the project and seeing how much hard work is put into a social community project such as this was very humbling.
