11.1 Looking Out for Messages: Crows
In analysis of the alphabetic, visual, audio and motion metaphors employed in the probes, I follow Lévi-Strauss’ (1962) notion that the bricoleur acts as if he or she is ‘constantly on the lookout for messages’ (p. 13) that can be found ‘in the heterogeneous objects of which his [her] treasury is composed to discover what each of them could signify and so contribute to definition of a set which has yet to materialise…’ (p. 12). Throughout the production of the probes, I have noticed certain images, sounds or movements were persistent performers in my ‘mind-cinema ’. ‘Marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love for experimental inquiry,’ the qualities suggested by Dewey (1910 [2015]) in adopting ‘the attitude of the scientific mind’ (loc. 6160), I set out to discover the messages behind those persistent mind-symbols.
According to Chandler (2002), symbols signify things that they do not resemble (p. 36). They carry some sort of conventional knowledge that must be learned in order to be recognised (p. 36). Given that, objects such as crows, smoke, strawberries or Beatles songs used in the original probes as metaphors symbolised things that they did not directly represent. Their meaning is only suggestive. Interestingly, this applies not only to the reader but also to the producer of these metaphoric compositions. The origins of what I ‘see or hear’ in my mind-cinema as responses to my representational activities are more often obscure than they are clear to me. My explanation for this is that the process of representing is guided, for the most part, by the subconscious. The mind ripples with associations evoking related recollections, transitory images and ephemeral inklings, raising symbols to the mind-screen from the complex mental schemata generated through years of mental-grasps’ blending. A sudden emergence of a particular memory in the form of a coded symbol is provoked by experienced qualia at certain moments of multimodal text construction.
The black ravens looked similar to those “poison gas wagons” camouflaged as delivery vans for bakery shops, by whose exhaust gases uncounted kulaks were killed at the beginning of the 1930s in the USSR while being driven from the prisons. (Prison Planet Forum: Russian Amnesia, retrieved from: http://forum.prisonplanet.com)
Citizens were ‘taken’ (the term arrest was not used) from their apartments or off the street in ‘black ravens’ (vehicles used to transport prisoners). (Gregory 2013, p. 88).
As a child, I undoubtedly heard about the ‘black ravens’.
The child’s mind applied a more literal sense to the metaphoric term given to those vans of horror. The apprehension of the dark monstrosities moving around the cities became anchored by the crows hovering in the sky. Clouds of black birds of terror flapping hastily all over the sky, taking people away—the unseen scene emanated from factual knowledge and developed into an inner cinematographic symbol. When in my study I started to restore the qualia of my associations with that period of my life, my subconscious naturally responded by producing the symbol—the meaning emerged like the results of a photographic emulsion when latent information develops into visible forms.
… I feel something starts within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of the great spaces traversed. (loc. 865)
The cinematic constructions of the mind create images and places that we might have never experienced before and yet upon closer look and applied divergent curiosity, we realise that those seemingly alien episodes are built from the data preserved by our subconscious. The mind-cinema rolls, ‘threading their pearls upon a grey background, like the pattern made through the cobwebs upon a window’ (Proust 1922 [2004], loc. 7470).
The sensory film projector ripples, reconnecting past and present so that what is hidden at a great depth is linked with what lies on the surface.
[…] is a corrective intervention into the past, not merely a chronicle of elapsed events. One of its aspects, for example, is ‘nourishing the child-that-you-were’. Thinking back to a difficult or traumatic phase of childhood, the individual talks to the child-that-was, comforting and supporting it and offering advice. (Giddens 1991, p. 71)
What made this particular intervention so special was that it was facilitated by conditions of ‘extremely’ deep remixability. The personal history items, photographs, documents, physical objects of sentimental value and memory grasps were broken into the fractals and ‘cross-fertilised’ with the aspects from disparate domains resulting in the emergence of an assortment of evoked memory-fragments. As the process unfolded, those memory-fragments were connected with self-similar (term from fractal geometry) memory-fragments that belonged to other people who lived in the same period of time and in the same social conditions. It was such an exciting thing to see your own embodied place within the gigantic fractal of the world history.
The bricoleur is naturally in possession of his/her personal facts, objects and skills that have accumulated in the process of life. To make meaning of the relationship between the bricole s from personal collections, the bricoleur-knower reaches into a larger medium that the Internet has turned into a universal database that is as close ‘at hand’ as photos in family albums or special items stored in boxes on wardrobe shelves. The universal database has ‘astronomical dimensions and has long since passed the point where it can be stored in a human memory’ as Flusser asserts (1985, loc. 1228). Human memories can have an ‘outer dialogue’ in which they find relevant data and synthesise the personal with the collective by application of cultural logic of remix. From this perspective, ‘the child-that-was’ can be comforted and supported by the notion that their story is part of a larger narrative, that they are not alone in having similar struggles and similar experiences with others.
By externalising our personal mental cinematography and position the fragments into the universal ‘playground’, we also refine our speculative thoughts, remodelling them into a better understood version and equipping ourselves with more effective ways to manage them. This activity engenders the production of new understanding, thus, self-design. As Maturana and Varela (1998) say: ‘we have a world that we bring forth with others’ (p. 248).
11.2 Figure-Ground Principle as Reconnection
According to Maturana and Varela (1998), ‘every act of knowing brings forth the world’ (p. 26), and we bring forth the world together with others. Does this mean that every act of self-reflection that gives rise to new awareness must be understood by others?
Namely, if I constructed a theory about why the images of the crows played an important role in my representation of the self at a certain period of my life, does this need to be understood by the reader of the multimodal text or can it be left ‘coded’, relying on other people’s decisions to, make the answers for themselves?
Self-representation in new media, for those who engage with it, means choosing to take part in one aspect of the lived culture of the day; it is made up of the negotiated codes and transactions in writing and reading the produced self. (Potter 2012, p. 39)
Potter further explains that this constitutes some problems for his own students when making self-produced videos, as ‘we see examples in which these codes are not as well understood or used [in some videos] as in others’ (p. 39). Accordingly, it appears that in the use of symbols or cross-modal metaphors, a sufficient system towards coding and deciphering symbols has not yet been developed.
It appears that there is compelling potential presented in multimodality for the development of symbolic and metaphoric embodiments. For example, the crow in my original probes was portrayed in multimodal form. This means that to an image was added sounds of flapping wings, rapid movements indicating certain directions, guttural harsh sounds and changing colours. All of these created what Eisenstein (1949), writing about film-montage, referred to as the ‘overtonal complex of the shot’ (p. 78). In the context of cinematic bricolage, these ‘collateral vibrations’, as Eisenstein described them, assume the role of the multimodal encrypting of meaning. For example, animations of the crows dashing in a pack, cawing and disappearing behind the Kremlin walls served as an audio/spatial/dynamic code. Crows fly in multitudes—the encryption of the sweeping political repressions of Stalin’s time. The crows proceeding from the spaces ‘outside’ the digital page towards the Kremlin walls—the artificially created facade of the Potemkin village—is a coded message of the freedom being driven in and locked behind the concrete wall. The massiveness and historical rigidness of the wall reminds the reader that what happens behind it is hidden from their view. These things are not explained in writing; they create an environment that ‘speaks by itself’ in one ‘unified grasp’. The aspects from the cognitive domain and things that are imagined through reading the written text are mixed with elements from the qualia domain, images, sounds, direction of the movements.
The central notion of reconnection lies in establishing a circuity between logic
qualia, or logic
grasp, in other words, between text
subtext, where the ‘collateral vibrations’ are not simply ‘disturbances’ of a principle element but its niche, within which the chief element is articulated. This organisation can be observed in a design principle of figure-ground, which is the relationship of the subject to its surrounding space. From this perspective, written text in cinematic writing can be associated with an element of figure that is articulated within the ground of multimodal codes.
11.3 Motion and Sound as Multimodal Codes
Cinematic writing engages the producer and reader alike in such a way that it causes interpretations of the principal factor, the written text within the collateral, the multimodal subtext
. This creates the figure
ground circularity in the production of meaning.
In the context of a learning task, the figure can signify the aspects of knowledge that are to be articulated, while ground is a niche of multimodal codes through which the emergence of the figure’s articulation comes to the surface. From a pedagogical point of view, the reconnected aspect of learning can be achieved by optimising the opportunity for the individual learner to follow his/her intrinsic motivations through composing a uniquely personal multimodal coding with the use of the figure
ground principle. The meaning emerging from the figure
ground circularity is based on the employment of the psychological tools
from a self-assembled repertoire and therefore reflects its uniqueness. Achieving a successful result under the conditions of striving for originality requires the elimination of self-shame or shaming behaviour demonstrated by others. It is essential to create a safe and respectful learning environment that makes students feel comfortable to include in their repertoire psychological tools that others might not consider to be popular or ‘cool’.
To some this might seem egotistical absorption in my own minutiae, which it would be if those minutiae did not affect so many other people. After a good smoke, if I am brought a list of Enemies of the People scheduled for execution and I spot a familiar name, I might easily write in my own hand, that the person in question is to be sent to the camps, whereas a bad pipe has soured my mood, I’ll sign the list without even looking. (Lourie 2000, p. 15)
The juxtaposition of the written text and smoke in my cinematic writing evolved into a coded message of Soviet times shrouded in secrecy, distrust and stealthily well-calculated actions of authorities. The crawling of the smoke behind the text-boxes and around the pages reflected qualia of oppression and the lack of air to breath for people living under dictatorial regime. Stalin’s style of moving and speaking was slow, like his pipe smoke that crept around the whole country, screening the truth and making cruel lies appear necessary for survival. Like a spider catching its victims with a hidden web, Stalin transmitted his manipulative poisonous smoky nets all over Russia for years.
11.4 Internationale
Strawberry Fields
In continuing to analyse the cinematic bricolage that I used in my probes, I would like again to underscore the epistemological aspect that Maturana and Varela (1998) describe as ‘the world that we bring forth with others’ (p. 248). In other words, every act of knowing ‘is a structural dance in the choreography of coexistence’ with others (p. 248).
In this section, I use the example of the incorporation of Beatles songs in my cinematic writing. While assembling animations to represent my imaginary meeting with ‘the fathers of Communism’ and particularly with Lenin in the original probe, I felt that juxtaposing the Internationale performed in German and the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields, seemingly an incongruous pairing, was a qualitatively accurate choice to express the rawness of my feelings. This kind of juxtaposition is a strategy described by Eisenstein (1949) as ‘a view that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept’, as well as by Koestler’s (1989) collision of two incompatible matrices. The most innocent moments of childhood metaphorically depicted with fragments of a garden, clear skies, the buzzing of bees, fluttering butterflies, the fragrance of strawberries ripening in the sun and the gullible laughter of Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, were contrasted with the abstract symbols of harsh austerity and skilfully disguised cruelty of the Soviet regime. In this juxtaposition of simplicity and trust against sophisticated treachery I saw the key in portraying a conflict, a coarse rupture within a sincere trust in the motherland and thus, life itself.
The Internationale sung in German was the symbolisation of Lenin’s specific and immense admiration for Germany (Service 2002, loc. 252). Lenin was raised by a mother of German and Swedish ancestry who remained loyal to German cultural traditions all her life (loc. 496). Before the communist revolution, Lenin lived in Germany for many years and held German society in high regard. ‘However, he wanted the West too to change. There had to be a European socialist revolution that would sweep away the whole capitalist order’ (loc. 252). Lenin was not very fond of Russians, who in his opinion were talented people but had a ‘lazy mentality’ (loc. 694). The Internationale, sung in German, as it appears to me, reverberated with Lenin’s treacherous plan. Russians to him were ‘sorry specimens that populated the corrupt world’ (Pipes 2003, p. 69) and were most likely used as disposable material for the first-stage trial before the larger and more important world revolution took place.
The images of smashed strawberries, sounds of a battle accompanied by the Strawberry Fields video-fragments from the movie Across the Universe (Taymor 2007) came to my mind as a bricolage, patching together aspects of simple naivety and corrupt barbarity.
A question remains, however: why was the mediation of my feelings so strongly connected with Beatles songs that had nothing to do with Communist reality through which my naïve trust in Motherland was so ruthlessly demoralised?
The Beatles were never invited to play in Soviet Russia, and their albums were considered a threat-banned long after the likes of Rolling Stones had records released behind The Iron Curtain.
In the late 1980s, we could buy Beatles records, but in my youth of the 1970s, their music was prohibited. My older brother once bought a bootleg Abbey Road cassette, paying more than half of the average monthly salary in Russia. What a treasure it was then … we played it quietly, so as not to annoy our mother and to ensure that a censorious ear could not catch the tune.
Earlier still, and under much more dangerous circumstances, I remember the bootleg circulation of discarded medical X-ray films with Beatles songs etched on them. It was such a pity I never had one. Owning one could cost you not just two-weeks of wages but also your studentship, job, or worse, depending on the circumstances. A very helpful thing, however, was that those bones-records were easy to bend and hide in the sleeve of your coat.
The more information I found on the topic, the more facts and events I retrieved from my own memory, and the more I was astounded by the size and importance of the Beatles subculture in Soviet Russia, something that I took for granted.
I always knew that my answer to a run-of-the-mill question about what music album I would take to an uninhabited island would be immediate—Abbey Road. The choice, however, is not based purely on aesthetic preferences.
‘The policeman said, ‘You are not Soviet man! You are living like a Western man!’ And he grabbed my hair’. The memory of how the cop dragged him along the platform by his hair while dozens of people stared and laughed was branded into him. ‘I was almost crying from the pain, but I had to keep silent. I was afraid the man would drag me off to prison.’ (loc. 1886)
Unfortunately, as far as I know, the people of that SBK subculture group never managed to stay in their home country. Every one of those whom I know personally and who would identify as one of the SBK now lives somewhere outside Russia. As Woodhead observes: ‘Millions of kids across the Soviet Union must have shared something of Vasin’s despair about their society’; they were ‘strangers in their own country’ (loc. 1052).
It feels as if the Beatles were the voice that made us open our eyes and look around with a critical view. It made us try the ground under our feet and helped us realise that there was no solid substance underneath the artificially constructed surface. It was all just a Potemkin village.
11.5 Technology Rocks Potemkin Villages
This is an example of how technology has facilitated the penetration of the Iron Curtain, as Kolya Vasin states in Woodhead’s (2013) book: ‘After the Beatles, the Iron Curtain was like a fence with holes. That was our secret. We breathed through those holes’ (loc. 1042). The radio played a massive role in this process. Searching for our favourite music on Radio Liberty, we were also given a chance to hear about things that were hidden from us. These two aspects, the information disclosed about society and the emotional response to the Beatles’ music, were tightly intertwined into our mental-grasp schemata. They eventually became inseparable.
The invention of the records ‘on bones’ was a sign of growing resistance to the regime. Its symbolical implication, as if recording the spirit of freedom on people’s bones, is an indication of the rigour of the subcultural movement. Medical electromagnetic radiation with recorded images on films and the technological capability to etch the sounds onto them made it possible to disseminate the songs. Consequently, with the Beatles’ music influencing the younger generation of Soviet Russia in the seventies, the technology was a conduit that enabled the flow of independent thought into an oppressed reality.
In comparing the technological possibilities that were available for the SBK with those that are easily accessible for the young people of today, I think about the great opportunities available for learning. However, despite media education expanding ‘at a quite alarming rate’ (Buckingham 2007, loc. 99), its application still adheres to the instructional and instrumental models of education.
The use of computers in schools is based on the now outdated view of human beings as information processors which continually reinforces erroneous mechanistic concepts of thinking, knowledge and communication. Information is presented as the basis of thinking whereas in reality […] Ideas are integrating patterns that derive not from information but from experience. (p. 70)
In the above quote, we can pinpoint another circularity archetypal to the process of knowledge generation—information
experience. This circularity reinforces the layered principle of digital production and comes as a natural component in collaboration with database
narrative.
Knowing through experience, is often an estranged constituent in the construction of knowledge. Observing this in the context of the discussed probe, we use the Iron Curtain as an analogy that screens learners from their ‘lifeworld’ (Kalantzis and Cope 2012) experiences which in contemporary conditions are inseparable from the involvement of digital media. Buckingham (2007) states: ‘It is quite extraordinary that the majority of young people should go through their school careers with so little opportunity to study and engage with the most significant contemporary forms of culture and communication’ (loc. 99).
In other words, personal concerns and issues, just as much as life’s celebrations and achievements, individual expressions and creative innovations, cherished values, burdens, interests, and enterprises, belong mainly to the domain of social media and personal communication devices. These aspects of experience are hidden behind a Potemkin village façade whose goal is to display the projection of what, how and through which avenue the ‘right’ form of learning must be attained. The Iron Curtain of education prevents learners from breathing fresh air, and the Potemkin village façade keeps them from finding and constructing their own truth about themselves and the world they inhabit.
[…] pursue a reflective relationship to their everyday experiences, they gain the ability to explore the hidden forces that have shaped their lives […] to awaken themselves from a mainstream dream with unexamined landscape of knowledge and consciousness construction … (p. 30)
In examining beliefs, social practices and dominant standpoints through the use of the materials and tools they have at hand in a given context and mediating meaning with digital media by cinematic bricolage, the knower produces alternative bodies of knowledge. Cinematic bricoleurs learn to form their own critical views and strategies for their advocacy using their immediate repertoire of resources. Speaking metaphorically, they invent their own ‘records on bones’ by expressing what was previously obscured from view, using whatever is at hand. This results in the formation of holes in the Iron Curtain of the Potemkin village, giving learners the ability to see reality with greater clarity, access it more freely, and if necessary, alter it without prohibition.
11.6 Individually, Together with Others
The role of technology in the situation described above was significant. The radio and homemade ‘records on bones’ spread the ‘air of freedom’ as a fast-growing weed beneath the layer of Soviet ideology. With the realisation that we were not alone, alienation began to vanish. There were other people who knew what we were supposed to know for years and they talked openly about it. Mind you, they did so from safe places outside Soviet Russia, as in the case of Radio Liberty. The prohibited thoughts and ideas those people expressed were emotionally anchored to Beatles songs, something that was incredibly appealing to the younger generation. Typically, Russians were oblivious to the themes of the Beatles songs due to general illiteracy in English, and regardless of the fact that the songs were mainly about love, as a result of their being remixed with the messages of freedom, they eventually became prominent symbols of liberation.
Framing this concept inside the context of the ripplework discussed in the earlier chapters, where the interactiveness of the systems is represented as a rippling surface, we can also imagine an invisible underlying layer of modern communication producing considerable ‘disturbances’ in the dynamics of the ripples.
The Al Jazeera News channel articulated this concept effectively in the brief opening of their video (Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77qewVIdo3c).
In the case considered in this book, the rippling surface represents a layer of individuals, communities, institutions, societies and so on. These all fluctuate due to undercurrents of radio, video, television waves and the Internet. These currents form connections between the ripples that are space/time distanced from each other. In other words, an individual or group of individuals can be connected with others by technology, transcending the limitations of the space/time. As Fromm (1941) sees it: ‘An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and belonging’ (p. 16).
From this perspective, I see the methodology of the Ripples model as a catalyst for students engaged in self-generated knowledge production to establish connections with other individuals on the basis of their personal interests, skills and levels of proficiency in the areas of their search for knowledge. Constructing their own resources by means of mobile video-, photo- and audio-recordings, remixing these fragments with self-generated or Internet-based components, and publishing or appropriating other individuals’ published materials, the producer acquires a sense of belonging to a wider community of enthusiasts about particular issues and topics. This fosters a sense of the importance of the particular interest and the possibilities for its application in the ‘real world’ and ‘real life’. It promotes further discovery or invention and special spaces for these individuals to engage their creative forces to work in collaboration with others.
The act of self-design as a fundamental goal of reconnected learning can be observed in this process through dynamic integration with community and awareness that the knowing is constructed together with others.
11.7 ‘Here Comes the … Knowing’
Assembling the original probes, I acted as an authentic remix practitioner. That meant sampling and appropriating fragments of the ideas developed or assembled by others and remixing them with my own self-produced database. According to Potter’s (2012) definition, ‘appropriation [is] the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content’ (p. 29). In relation to this term, Potter elaborates on the issue of being ‘a skilled media manipulator’ who is ‘borrowing the cultural capital of the original producer(s)’ and by either distancing or nearing him/herself ‘to the original meaning’, establishes his/her own set of abstracts and thus initiates his/her intertextual interactions (p. 30). In identifying the practice of appropriation, Potter mentions Jenkins’ concept of the ‘textual poacher’ (p. 29). In his discussion of the participatory culture of ‘textual poachers’, Jenkins (2012), in turn, refers to De Certeau’s (1984) concept of consumers being involved in the practice of ‘poetic ways of “making do”’ (De Certeau 1984, loc. 97)—that is, of bricolage, as discussed throughout the pages of this book. De Certeau states that ‘users make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules’ (loc. 73).
Now we can observe ripplework’s systemic interactions within a larger medium, that is, the ripplework of knowing. As De Certeau (1984) draws into the discourse the consumer practice of ‘making do’, associating it with nomadic ways of hunting and gathering, it now takes place ‘in artificial steppes and forests’ (loc. 2402), or as it can be conceptualised here, ‘ripplework’.
They are aesthetic objects which draw on the artistic traditions of the fan community as well as on the personal creativity and insights of individual consumer/artist […] a poached culture requires a conception of aesthetics emphasis in borrowing and recombination as much or more as original creation and artistic innovation. (p. 223)
In other words, in borrowing from what they are enthusiastic about, the nomadic consumers ‘make do’ by hunting and gathering in artificial environments not only to satisfy their personal needs but also to produce something new by drawing on their innate creative forces. Accordingly, consumers become producers, which as Potter (2012) explains, ‘suggests a deeper engagement with the material and a richer potential account of how the meaning is made’ (p. 30). A key part of reorganising ‘raw materials to make new meaning’ is the process of editing. Editing, in Potter’s view, is intertwined in an emergent practice that he articulates in terms of a curatorship metaphor (loc. 150): ‘making new meanings from found physical objects and texts by placing them alongside things that you make yourself in order to “echo concerns and styles”, find some markers of identity, and communicate them’ (loc. 150). Although the practice has a long historic tradition, similar to remix, it is new ‘in the way in which those who have access to the digital artefacts at their fingerprints have the means to take and remix content, to publish things that they have made alongside things they have created and establish new relationships between the elements to make new meaning’ (loc. 171). For Potter, the practice of curatorship is a methodology for ‘self-reflective projects of identity in late modernity’ (loc. 171), useful as a means of ‘ontological security that will carry the individual through transitions, crises and circumstances of high risk’ (Giddens 1991, p. 40).
In the above few paragraphs, I have performed a both-directions loop, bricolaging together the concepts taken from the studies of several influential theorists in the area of my interest. In this way, I demonstrated ‘a rippling effect’ illustrated earlier. That is, moving through a ripplework, I come across one ripple (a book written by one author), I pick up the relevant ideas and then see an interesting ‘ripple’ produced by another. Borrowing the term from Freire (1998), being driven by my ‘epistemological curiosity’ (p. 32), I enter ‘the ripple’ created by another author and so on.
My ‘epistemological curiosity’ guides me through ‘the ripples’, collecting bits and pieces from each of them that are consistent with my individual interest in this precise field of study in order to produce my own ‘ripple’. What is important for the Ripples pedagogical model is that digital media enables the ‘rippling’ network with a new blueprint. The Internet and mobile digital devices make it possible to relatively easily and quickly identify, become connected with and join networks of essential resources and affiliated associations, transcending space/time limitations.
Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before […] – but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience. (loc. 5156)
The knowledge gatherer extends his/her field of ‘textual poaching’, as Jenkins terms it, by looping ‘across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves’ (De Certeau 1984, loc. 2533). Jenkins, endows ‘textual poachers’ with more ethical qualities. He argues that they turn their activities of appropriation into acts of creation. Intermeshing De Certeau’s and Jenkins’ concepts with the theme of this book, it can be said that the bricoleur, ‘rippling’ through the context of a digital medium, influenced by the digital currents, hunts and gathers along his/her way for material that can sustain his/her personal eclectic constructions. From a reconnected learning point of view, the learner personalises the constructed knowledge within his/her own making through the act of equilibrating with the surrounding environment. In doing so, he/she engages him/herself in the process of self-design.
An important mechanism in this process, as Potter identifies, is editing of ‘the plundered goods’ within the context of personal experience, as well as the skilful curatorship of the newly created virtual galleries of the remixed collections. Considered in the frame of reconnected learning, curatorship is an ongoing process of bricolaging, namely, gathering new knowledge by ‘nomadic ways’ of ‘textual poaching’ and ‘editing’ the collected bits and pieces in the space of the knower’s personal ‘gallery’, in ‘a do-it-yourself’ manner for the purpose of meaning emergence. The development of a photographic film, with latent content that become visible through interactions with chemicals in specific physical conditions, can be compared to curatorship practices. Gathering the essential material and manipulating it according to the affordances of digital media, the bricoleur makes the content of his/her own mind-cinema visible and approachable for reflections.
11.8 Convergence Points
This chapter examined cinematic writing—a representational technique using digital writing with images, sounds and motion—as a method of making meaning from personal experience, both factual and invented. Due to its capability of self-managed data-gathering across the natural and digital landscapes and its remixability with self-produced material, cinematic bricolage , which is further developed into the Ripples model of knowing, is identified as a nomadic, do-it-yourself (DIY) methodology.
The metaphoric method proved to be a compelling strategy in embodying tacit knowledge with the use of representational modalities. It revealed the capacity to trigger self-discovering tendencies. It appeared that mind symbols could have deep roots embedded in mental structures, and upon further examination, could emerge with deep-seated meanings attached to them. This led to a realisation that different people placed in the same socio-historical context could develop similar associative mind symbols brought about by experiencing similar cultural conditions and events. Elliott (2014), in interpreting the work of Mead (1934), writes: ‘Symbols have universal quality for the social groups in which they are meaningful; symbols are the common currency through which individuals forge sense of self and interact with other people’ (Elliott 2014, p. 31).
Symbolic representations of the events emerging from deep layers of mental schemata revealed that they can shape responses and behaviours in relation to political ideology. In this context, embodying the fragments from mental structures into multimodal metaphoric representations allowed the analysis of the self to be carried out from a different perspective and suggested options for ‘the individual owner’, as Elliott puts it, ‘to deal with the self-agency’, facilitating self-designing alterations.
By integrating multimodal metaphoric representations into meaning-making activities, the knower engages him/herself in deep analysis of the kind of self with which he/she wishes to identify. That is, the knower adjusts and transforms him/herself, not in accordance with how other people want to see him/her, but with how/she wishes to see him/herself.