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.
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