So I’m getting ready for a meeting with our branch managers and I’ve been scouring the web for examples of innovative ways that other libraries are using media production. I came across this amazing collaboration between the New York Public Library and the design blog . They’re producing a series of videos called “Design by the Book” in which they film five NY designers as they visit the library to find inspiration and incorporate their findings into new work!
I get really excited about using media production to do more than just tell people things. It’s so boring when it just ends up being a one-sided conversation- “buy this, do this, visit the library because it’s great”. Booorring. It’s so much more interesting when you can engage your community like this and then actually SHOW how your resources can be utilized.
Plus it’s really nice looking and well edited. I wish more libraries would take a minute and figure out how to use a microphone and a tripod before shooting stuff. Ooh, snap.
This is kind of a sketch for a much larger project I’ve been thinking about for probably two years now. I’ve dubbed it the “1000X Project”.
When I was maybe five years old, my parents brought home a huge basket full of apples and put them in our kitchen. I can’t remember if we’d visited an orchard or what. Apparently I snuck into the kitchen and proceeded to take a single bite from EVERY APPLE. Then I put all the apples back into the basket, turned so the bite marks were hidden. I don’t remember doing this.
I think my parents were amused when they discovered what I had done. My mom says she thinks I was “just searching for the perfect apple”. I have always liked to tell this story, not only because it’s kind of funny, but also because it seems like everyone I tell it to has a similar kind of story about something they did or said when they were a kid. As children we said or did things either out of curiosity or some very natural drive to create or to explore. And we started to learn, from our parents or others, that some of these actions were not quite “normal” or “appropriate”. Part of growing up in any society is learning about and then respecting certain social norms and boundaries. Adults who fail to respect those boundaries are probably going to be considered either rude or crazy.
For example, children like to stare. In line at the grocery store, I love to watch little kids staring at people. They haven’t learned yet that it’s “rude”- they’re just curious, and they find new people and new faces fascinating, especially if they’re different than the faces they’re accustomed to seeing. But soon enough they have it drilled into them by the adults in their lives that staring isn’t appropriate. And so they begin to learn to hide their curiosity, because it makes other people uncomfortable.
My friend Grace remembers being fascinated by watching her mother put on makeup. One day Grace took a tube of her mom’s lipstick and proceeded to cover her entire face with it. My friend Lisa grew up without any pets. She lived in a very arid part of Texas, and she started capturing tumbleweeds and trying them to a fence with string. She thought of the weeds as her pets. One day her dad untied them all. She was crushed. My boyfriend, proud that he could write his name, took a knife and carved the letters into his dresser. He showed his mother, thinking she would be proud, and found out otherwise.
These are the kind of things that are interesting to me. These specific moments of childhood creation and exploration- the things we remember but that we wouldn’t dare repeat. Maybe we were told gently, maybe we were laughed at, maybe we were scolded, maybe we were beaten. Maybe that moment was a turning point in our childhood, or maybe it was just one of many subtle lessons that added up to a larger picture of what we were taught about being a functioning member of society. Either way, we took note, and we started to change.
So for the project-I started by re-enacting my apple incident. I’m not really happy with the way it looks and I’d definitely re-shoot it for the project. I shot it in a small space in my old apartment with a couple of shop lights which nearly melted my face off. I bought a huge sack of apples from the grocery store and filled a basket. I wanted the whole thing to have a really intentional kind of ritualistic quality to it, so I tried to pace my motions and make everything fluid. I took small bites of apple but by the end I felt kind of sick. At one point I bit into a slightly rotten one and I almost gagged but I kept going! Uck.
I’d like to do a series of these, with adults re-enacting their specific incidents, all in a formal and delicate manner. Kind of conjuring up our spirits from childhood. I’d like to accumulate a whole catalog of these re-enactments, and then there would be lots of interesting ways to display them. I think about entering a huge, neutral white space with lots of these images projected one right after the other, larger than life, silent, ghost-like. I’d like to keep all the forms close to each other in terms of scale and then arrange them next to each other however they interact best visually…
Shazam! Please let me know if you have an “incident” you’d like to contribute to the project.
Oh wow. One of my roommates from college, Jaimie Warren, has been up to something AWESOME and I didn’t even know about it until today. She’s collaborating with some other KC artists to produce a kind of public-access, talent show, dance-a-thon, I don’t know what. For kids! And adults. They’re doing a run of shows at La Esquina RIGHT NOW! And one of them happens to fall on Pema’s first birthday, so I imagine we’ll be there with weird outfits on!
Jaimie’s the one wearing the french fries.
Ha ha- here’s Richie’s spot-on review:
“It’s like watching my childhood on television after doing a bunch of drugs and not showering for a week.”
Once an institution devoted to book circulation, the public library is evolving. A recent study of the members of ICMA, the premier local government leadership and management organization, found some communities are using their public libraries for compelling new projects, such as providing services for teens, immigrant residents, recycling, health, and public safety.
During the next two years, with the help of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ICMA plans to encourage adoption of more such leading practices among local governments and demonstrate the value of public libraries as a vital tool in supporting community sustainability through the ICMA Public Library Innovation Grant. Local governments can employ these grants to develop new and creative ways of using their public library to deliver services in areas such as public safety, disaster preparedness, sustainability, health, immigration, civic engagement, and economic development.
Um, hello? That is awesome. Individual grants will range from $20K- $60K with a total of $500K being provided for the program. It looks like they’re really trying to encourage local governments to look at libraries as a direct link to their communities and to get creative with using those links to address important local issues.
Hopefully I can drum up some interest around here so we can move forward with applying. I would love to implement either some kind of literacy program with a focus on native Spanish speakers or something related to educating the community on sustainable living. There’s a great little community garden on 7th Street where residents can sign up for a plot and grow their own fruits and veggies. They even grew cotton one year! Some of them take their produce home to their families, some of them take it to local markets to sell, and some of them donate it to those who need it more. Seems like that could be a great starting place and a great model for bigger projects down the line.
Last week our director gave us the go-ahead to put our early literacy video, Growing Readers, under a BY-NC-ND Creative Commons license. This is exciting for several reasons. What this means is that anybody who wants to is now free to screen, copy and distribute our video as long as 1) we get credit, 2) no one is making a profit from it and 3) the video isn’t modified in any way. Any group, institution or individual is free to show and share this video without worrying about obtaining our permission. The BY-NC-ND CC license is the most restrictive, and is sometimes referred to as the “free publicity” license in that it essentially encourages the sharing and distribution of the licensed work while prohibiting any modifications from being made.
This seems to fall in line beautifully with what libraries are about- the free sharing of information. I hope to see other libraries and non-profit educational and cultural institutions that produce media looking to Creative Commons as an alternative to traditional copyright. It seems to me that releasing work under this type of license could only benefit the participating institutions- it’s a great way to encourage people to find, use, and share your work with others.
I’ll be uploading and linking to Growing Readers soon- both the English and Spanish versions!
A message is a load of crap. I don’t know what I want to say to people. I get ideas and I want to put them on film because they thrill me. You may say that people look for meaning in everything, but they don’t. They’ve got life going on around them and they don’t look for meaning there, yet they expect to find meaning when they go to a movie. I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.
