Reflections on "Reinventing"

Unfortunately, I have been unable to upload the revised production to YouTube. I thought that this might be due to the size of the full quality piece (1.26GB). However, even after compressing it down to an 8.5 MB file (which left it looking rather shabby), all of my attempts to upload it crashed my computer (and I attempted the upload from two different machines.) Nevertheless, here are some of my main thoughts about the original production and revisions made to the piece.

Purpose of Project
Reinventing the Social Body is my final project for a digital storytelling course. In brief, the point of the production was to pilot a pitch to potential investors in a health education media business I am planning to launch. While a portion of the business will be devoted to research and development of body minded educational programs and products for consumers and health care professionals, the business will also offer meeting and wellness facilities and services catering to the media and medical industries.

After having produced a brief autobiography that overviews my creative, professional, and academic development, I set out to produce a short video that would summarize my perspective regarding media saturated society and how media is an imperative component in establishing a 21st Century framework for teaching and facilitating integration of body and mind. This vision is the essential driving force for creating the business plan.

Developing the Production
I was surprised that the conceptual gestation for this video took many months. I knew what I wanted to convey, but it was a challenge to make it simple, clear, academically rigorous, relevant in an intellectual and felt sense, and render it as a marketable concept. I took my video camera with me often during those months, recoding nature images that moved me. Once I had a sturdy visual story map (Ohler, 2008), writing the narrative took about 3 days and the initial production assembly and editing took 4 days.

In the first version of Reinventing the Social Body, I had thought about using body images and animations of bodies, but opted for video footage and photos of nature I had shot. The idea was to present trees as a metaphor for bodies and water as metaphor for social contexts. The intention was to elicit in the viewer a felt connection to their own nature, rather than perpetuating objectification of the body by viewing some other body. I had expected that the nature shots would invoke the "nature deficit disorder" theory (Louv,2008 ), that we are suffering in many ways at this point in history because we are so infrequently immersed in unfettered natural surrounds. I used the fallen trees when talking about overextended senses and other symptoms of social strain to suggest the uprooted, collapsed body, falling into media saturation. The concentric ripple jump cut at the word "touch" in the original version was used to represent the notion that touch is a realm of social experience that is woefully disrupted. For the "Which do we trust" segment, the accompanying image to the narrative question is actually a path with two tracks of stone inlay. I thought it was an appropriate image to support the question, "what path are we on?" in terms of trusting our individual life and social choices, and the stones lent some continuity of the “nature” theme.

Revisions to the Production
I was advised to replace the nature shots with more direct, precise, literal images of bodies, to ensure a clear message of concern about the body and not ecosystems. At first I’d thought that the nature metaphors had failed because I did not clearly establish the symbolism. In considering what body images to use in revision, it became clearer to me that it was important to at once represent the body, yet connote a conspicuous absence of the body, that is, a fragmentation of mind and body, a disconnect from bodily knowing. A documentary on the displacement of embodied cognition from flesh to electronics could most clearly drive the point home by digitally manipulating, in many layers, abstract representations of the body. I photographed wood and rubber models of the human body, as well as shadows of those objects, and added various special effects. As it turns out, the images tend to resonate much more with the question, “what sense of body does media create?” than the nature shots.

In addition, importantly, despite calling attention to a cumbersome problem that typically goes unnoticed, the new content delivers the call without framing the narrative as one of dying, collapsing nature, per se. The new images conjure much more space for hope and optimism, a human resource within our immediate control.

The revision process also gave me an opportunity to revisit some sequences that I hadn’t been fully satisfied with in the first version. For example, the moving background and colors in the sequence describing “the positive body in the 21st Century” and the Positive Body graph that is overlaid at the end of that sequence. I also cut down the length on the dancing hands visual, and included additional title graphics. The result is a much more fluid and engaging piece.

The most recent version of the piece ends with a picture credit indicating,“All pictures and video used in this piece are original. The “Question mark” and “Asynchronous” graphics were adapted from MS Powerpoint.”

Conceptual Reflection
I was asked if McLuhan influenced me in creating this piece. The concept of extension of the senses did inspire me greatly in my communication studies days (1970’s and 90’s). Now, after 20 years of practice as a massage therapist and educator, I'm much more intrigued by notions of actual physical sensory disruption and by media embodied cognition that excludes reliance on an authentic primary technology of the body (D.H. Johnson, 1992).

I'm much more of a constructivist/constructionist at heart than a technological determinist. Extension of senses through media and externally embodied cognition, together, occur to me as a social construction that perhaps compensates for failed development of bodily intelligence, particularly in social relationships (distinct from knowing one's own health status, or from intuitive sensitivities, or fantasy). Media constructs that support a host of hyper defensive social body taboos (and sometimes recklessly promote defying them) and that, hypothetically, inhibit healthy development of affective self-regulation, in turn, may account for some of the extreme narcissistic tendencies presenting today. Yet, I see media as a necessary vehicle to scaffold development of interoceptive skill and social intelligence that is direly needed on a massive scale. The beauty of media is that it can be designed to provide the zone of narrative safety by which this exploration, discovery and development can occur.


References

Johnson, D. H. (1992) Body: Recovering our sensual wisdom. Berkley, CA; North Atlantic Books.
Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature deficit disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
Ohler, J. (2008). Digital storytelling in the classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA : Corwin.