Week 8

On eighth week we met one more time to discuss our stories. The subject of the photographic 'evidence' also came up, and we also agreed we should have 'testing' footage. Danny has a camera, so we'll definitely be testing it on video so we can post it online, making the content a little more interesting. In class itself we didn't do much but receive assistance when it came to coding for the assignment, which Zach handled. The rest of us just sat around and worked on either other parts of the projects or different homework. Currently, the goal is to have the narration done by Thursday, and hopefully the pictures done as well. Zach's friend Sam will be doing the narration, and we're going to draft random friends to be the other actors. So far we're actually on target for once, hopefully everyone will pull through by Friday.

What's happening now

Currently, we're separately refining our scripts, sharing them with one another over a joint Google Documents page in order to receive input from the other members. The plan is to have the final audio scripts available Wednesday, so we can hopefully record them over the weekend. We're also planning on separately heading to school and taking pictures of the areas we are 'enhancing' the history of, and Photoshopping them to suit our needs. The goal of getting them completed is again Wednesday, whether we meet that goal remains to be seen.

The inside story

The majority of our meetings so far have been either sharing idea or compiling ideas. Originally, we each brought about ten separate ideas to the table, and one by own shared them with the group. As a group we decided on which ones were best, picking a total of sixteen and assigning four to each person. We then had a week to flesh out the ideas, with the idea that actual face - to -face meeting as opposed to emailing back and forth our respective ideas was more productive, and added more incentive to finish in time. Each brought to the table their assignments.

Again, we read them out loud to each other, and then offered suggestions or pointed out continuity errors or plots holes. We then agreed to spend the next week rewriting everything into audio scripts, including fake interviews and breaking the fourth wall and referencing the user and the location where the user is located. Currently, we're in the process of refining our audio scripts, and hope to start photographing and modifying photos of locations as needed. The next meeting will be next Wednesday, where hopefully the scripts can be finalized.

Conceptual Changes Recap (whew, long post!)

So perhaps a little recap of all the concepts and ideas we've gone through is in order. Seeing as this blog is documentation of all the things we've done, I'll start at the beginning.

The first time we met, we started brainstorming ideas. Most of them were entirely unrelated to our current project and so not really relevant. Ideas included pachinko in the eucalyptus grove, pong on the freeway, etc. The idea that was closest to our current project, and through iteration became Hidden HiSDory, was a simple desire to express how boring our campus is. Our original idea revolved around making a statement about the UCSD campus as a boring, history-less institution. So, we planned to create fantastical, if believable, pieces of faux-history and use those to tell a story. When the viewer found out that these events were all fictitious, they would be left wanting more from our fair school. That was the statement we wanted to make.

The form of the project was to be similar to 34n118w in its presentation. A map, overlaid with 'hotspots,' would be presented to the user. Their GPS coordinates would move them around the map of campus, and when they arrived at a hotspot, some sort of multimedia would start playing--photos, video, audio, etc. Each of these hotspots would have a fictitious event that constructed an overall history.

However, when we started to refine our idea in the next meeting, we realized that the simple issue of "boring campus" had been done too much. So, we decided to tackle another issue. We discussed, back and forth, until we came to a consensus that the reason we thought UCSD was boring is because no single event, movement, or issue has ever really made a lasting impact. The result is a school that trucks on into the future, growing larger and more bureaucratic as the years pass. Its concerns are not issues or events, but of fiscal responsibility and professor research. So, no important issue has left more than a dent, a pockmark in the surface veneer of the institution itself. (An example would be the current go-green initiative--a laughable farce of the Housing and Dining Services to garner good PR from the more environmentally aware students.) So, we settled on dealing with one of the issues that UCSD as a university seemed unable to deal with due to its immense size.

We went through every issue we could think of, past and present: gay rights; wars, both specific and abstracted; women's rights; African-American rights; poverty; and immigration, to name a few. Once we had come up with this list, none of these seemed to match the scope of the message we were trying to bring. After a couple pieces of content around the map, any issue we could think of would lose its appeal and emotional connection, which is really what we were going for in order to get the user to change their opinions of UCSD after experiencing the project. We realized that none of these issues were large or interesting and varied enough to hold the project on its own. So, we chose the meta-issue of student apathy.

Part of the reason that UCSD seems unaffected by the world around it, we reasoned, was because of the student body. We, as students, are apathetic to the issues in much the same way as the administration. So, rather than focusing on a single issue, we could focus on all the issues and the way that they're ignored and have been forgotten by the student body. The aim was to show students how apathetic they are by constructing a history of UCSD where the students are anything but apathetic. In our artificial history, the UCSD student body would be active, passionate, and engaged in the issues of the time. We counted on most of these issues having resonance today, as it was crucial to make a connection with the now-apathetic students. Issues like immigration, academic stress, and religion all have some weight today, even though we choose to ignore them. So, we started brainstorming stories (and, to make a long story short, we narrowed the list down to sixteen--four per person). 

Our next meeting was not of conceptual changes, but of fleshing out of the stories, so I will abbreviate the full meeting. We simply exchanged fuller story summaries so we could connect them all in our timeline of UCSD and see if all of them fit together conceptually. This was about the time that I posted the map, below.

For the midterm, when we presented, we were bombarded with interesting ideas to help the project. Before going into the chief concern that shaped our project yet again, some of the ideas were: contrasting the frivolity of today with the activism of yesteryear by superimposing a map of festivals over demonstrations; advertising with posters around campus in a familiar "did you know...?" style; playing with the amount of truth in the project--some are fully true, some are false, or some that have some truth in them; engaging the user more by providing multiple options per area and asking them to pick which seems the likeliest to be true; providing the content through a website; the final presentation of the project to students; etc.

All of the ideas were good, and we decided to pick up on some of them (namely, the advertising campaign and the final presentation), but we simply couldn't take all of the ideas and put them in. We discussed an important issue brought up during the midterm--truth--in detail, and decided that we wanted to have control over the message of our project, and that if we had sufficiently plausible falsehoods, they would be just as valuable, if not more valuable, than less interesting truths. As for the presentation, we realized that we hadn't thought past the concept of the project, and we really liked the idea of actually making the project available to the public. We will plan for at least one day of presentation to the public, with documentation (of course)!

The big problem (or issue with our project) that was raised in the midterm 'grilling' was the final step in our project. This final step is the missing link between making students aware of their apathy and changing their apathy to activism. Granted, we realized we couldn't suddenly make everyone an activist, but as Jeff pointed out, that's the aim of all art: to make a change in the viewer. Most of the above suggestions were in response to this hole in our project; they were ways to engage or tie in the user so they do undergo a change during the project.

None of these ideas could work, we realized, because of this: our project was already set up to elicit a change in the viewer. We just hadn't realized it until the meeting after the midterm. We realized that all the students know that the student body is apathetic as a whole (even if the individual isn't). So, our aim with the project wasn't really to make students aware of this apathy, but to make them feel guilty about it. By portraying UCSD as interesting, active, and engaged, the students will feel guilty about the real UCSD. Just by viewing the contrast between the faux-UCSD and the real UCSD, the viewer will change. We realized that we don't have to make everyone an activist. We just have to make them feel bad for being apathetic.

So, we kept our original tact, after several hours of discussion of possible changes. We vowed to be very careful with the stories, though, as they are the heart of the project. Most of the other projects in the class are reflexive; that is, they are about the form in which they're presented. Ours isn't. So, the content of the piece will have to be engaging enough to carry it into the guilt zone. That's where we are now. We're striving for interesting, emotionally engaging pieces of history that tie in to current issues. We'll see if that works out.

Finalized Locations

Here's the map with the finalized locations. It took some rearranging of the spaces in which the content would be triggered, but we feel like we've hit on a comprehensive campus tour. 

All six colleges have at least one tour element, and the timeline of the events is spread out enough to encompass all of UCSD's history--from the '60s to the early '00s.

As this is a location-based project, perhaps a good place to start would be to visually map all of the locations in the project on one comprehensive map. I've made a rather large-scale map of the entire campus via Google Maps as a placeholder for a handmade map later. 

It should help us see the distribution of hotspots and locations across campus, so we can refine the project spatially.

We've chosen to use the entire campus as the location for the project, but we have to be careful where we decide to put content, as we might end up only using half the campus and failing in the attempt to create a believable tour.

So right now we're in the process of fleshing out each of our stories - where, when, how, what...- for our meeting on Wednesday May 6.

Hidden HiSDory Project

This blog will serve as a documentation of our work on our project, Hidden HiSDory.

We will post updates throughout the process of creating the project to help document our thoughts and ideas, as well as our workflow to the final product.