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Mike Ananny

Mike Ananny is developing new cultural technologies at Media Lab Europe in Dublin. Here he describes a project using mobile phones in a community where computers and internet connections are scarce. Find out about TexTales.

What is your background and what are some of your influences which you brought to this project?

My academic background has tended to be interdisciplinary: I did a double-major Bachelors of Science at the University of Toronto and then a Masters in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory. I've always tried just to work on interesting research questions, combining different perspectives and disciplines as needed. Although my formal training has focused on science and technology, I've always had an interest in communications - how people learn to communicate, communicate differently with different audiences and how people become fluent with a wide variety of media. My masters work focused on designing toys for very young children, helping them play with language and acquire literacy skills in oral media we usually think are reserved for written text. Lately, my focus has shifted to questions of larger-scale communications - or, more specifically, how people who aren't politicians come to have different opinions about public issues. Along the way, it's been fun and challenging for me to work with different people, design communications tools with them and re-think traditional notions like "community".

Can you briefly describe how the TexTales system works?

TexTales is a large-scale installation for public collaborative publishing. It displays a 3-by-3 grid of photos and associated captions on a building wall. Anyone viewing the wall can choose a photo for which they would like to create a caption, send an SMS text message with their caption and, after a delay of approximately 10 seconds, see their caption added to the wall. For each photo, TexTales displays the 3 most recent SMS captions but for every SMS message sent the system records: a unique identifier; the phone number from which the SMS text was sent; the photo for which the caption was created; the caption; the date and the time. TexTales has 3 components: custom software interfacing with a Nokia Card Phone to receive and parse standard SMS text messages; a custom tcl/HTML script to create the image-text combinations; and a web server to display the interface. Users contribute a photo caption by sending a text in the form to the system (e.g. 4 who's that?) and, approximately 20 seconds later, the caption appears anonymously under the image. Earlier captions appear progressively smaller and all captions are stored in log files. TexTales thus both presents a view of recent captioning and tracks how people contribute and develop captions over time, offering individuals and communities starting points for developing and debating emergent and collective identities.

I'm curious how much of the technical functionality was pre-determined before the project. Which parts of the idea for TexTales did you have prior to meeting with the Fatima History Project; which developed out of collaboration with them?

The technical functionality came out of very early discussions with the Fatima History Project and emerged from the challenges their situation presented. My primary research interest was in working with people to help them design a community discussion tool different from traditional web-based bulletin boards I didn't want to consider Fatima as a static community and then "put it on-line". Instead, I wanted to design something with them that might invite more participation from the community at large - recognizing that definitions of "community" change and that we shouldn't see them as existing in just physical or just on-line settings - a combination of the two might be interesting.
It was also obvious that, since few of the residents had easy access to computers and few of them would likely go regularly to an Internet café, a different method of interaction was required. This necessitated selecting a display mechanism (public projection) and supporting a commonly used ubiquitous technology (mobile phones).

We were also fortunate to have established an excellent collaboration with the school of photojournalism at Loyalist College Canada. One of the professors there, Frank O'Connor, and two of his students, Jeff Cooper and Sarah Faulkner, spent a couple weeks in Dublin working with us and about a dozen children from Fatima in the summer of 2002. Frank, Jeff and Sarah helped us all better understand what photojournalism is and provided much of the inspiration to do work in this way.
The initial starter for the project came from a photojournalism class Frank teaches where students there have to edit the work of people in a different place and culture with whom they've never met. Through a donation from Kodak, Frank and his students provided the cameras and the eliciting questions that photojournalists sometimes ask themselves, like: "show me something in your community you love", "show me something you hate" and "show me something you'd like someone standing here 100 years from now to see"1. With these loose guidelines (very few people answered the questions explicitly), residents began to gather pictures for the new archive.

They took over 700 photos and our challenge became finding ways to use these images to spark dialogue within and about Fatima. At this point, I was also fortunate to start working with Dr. Kathleen Biddick, a visiting Fulbright scholar from the University of Notre Dame. With her, I worked with approximately 10 women over the course of several weeks to survey all images and select and arrange 90 photos for the first TexTales installation. Concurrently, at Media Lab Europe with the support of Dr. Carol Strohecker, our Everyday Learning group and two colleagues Brendan Donovan and Jamie Rasmussen, we developed a technical architecture for large-scale public display and annotation of digital images.
So, it was really quite a nice and messy mix of collaboration with many different contributors: Frank, Jeff, Sarah, Kathleen, Carol, Brendan, Jamie the women of Fatima. And although the technical functionality was developed at Media Lab Europe the Fatima residents provided the content and Fatima's unique environment provided the inspiration.

What, taking from your experience in TexTales, is important to consider when setting up projects in local communities?

This is a very difficult but important question. As a designer/researcher, I tried to enter into the situation as both a participant and an observer. My goal was to convey to the people in the community my own sense of excitement and interest in a project but also to listen and try to understand their priorities and motivations. Personally, I like to have these conversations while we're engaged in some kind of building or making activity, rather than leaving these discussions in the abstract.
It sounds simplistic but I think the most important thing is to remain flexible, remember that you're a guest in the community and that the onus is on you as a designer/researcher to balance your own concerns with those of the people you're working with. This sounds a bit heavy. Most of the time, it was just a lot of fun - you get to know people a little, you get to spend time with them over a period of weeks or months and, most importantly, you try to understand what they find important. I tried my hardest to establish good relationships, hoping that good work would result. A few years ago, someone told me that most of life is about relationships and managing expectations - I'd say the same is true for working with local communities.

It looks like you brought participants in at an early stage in design. Can you give an example of a change or modification that arose from their involvement?

Yes, the history group was involved as early as possible. Although the "look and feel" of TexTales didn't change much after we began collaborating, there were lots of issues around what how the content - the pictures and texts - would work. The group felt strongly that the texts people send to the system should be anonymous and that everyone who appeared in any of the displayed images would have to give their permissions. Frankly, I would have like the system be a little less anonymous but, at that stage of the collaboration, the group felt that this was the right decision so that's what we went with.

Was getting participation difficult? If so, what were some ways you encouraged people to think differently and participate in the project?

Participation was a little difficult, yes. There was great enthusiasm at the beginning of the project as we all looked through the images together - it was like looking through a family's photo album where Kathy and I got to ask lots of questions about people, places and events. I was interested in how the group was talking and thinking about the photographs but, as time went on, we started to lose some focus about why we were doing the whole project.
We tried a few different ways of looking at the images but I think the real turning point was when the group came into the lab and saw the working prototype of the system with all their pictures embedded. We practiced texting to the system, found lots of bugs and talked about where to situate the installation. I think that activity helped us all better understand why we were doing the work. The balance I found difficult to manage was this: remaining flexible enough to respond to the group's interests and ways of participating while still moving the project forward with some kind of structure whenever momentum started to wane. This was hard.

Would you say that you are aware of current community cultural development research; community arts projects in Ireland (or Europe) using traditional arts; or new media / net art? If so, what kinds of influences might these have had on your own work?

I'm aware of some of the work but, given that I'm a Canadian who's been in Dublin for a couple of years, I still have a lot to learn. From my collaborator Kathy Biddick I learned about the Leeds CityPoems project - this was a nice inspiration. Media Lab Europe is also fortunate to have a partnership with the Liberties' Digital Hub and The Ark, a children's cultural centre in Dublin's Temple Bar. They help us stay current with much Irish and European community cultural development work. I still have a lot to learn about these scenes but I've been impressed with the number and diversity of cultural community projects in Ireland. It's a fantastic environment to do this kind of work.

Can you briefly talk about your approach in your work, and what it might have to offer artists who work in collaborative community arts projects using technology?

We generally work in the tradition of "constructionist design", first articulated by Professor Seymour Papert of the MIT Media Laboratory but developed subsequently by many excellent artists, designers and researchers. This is a huge and rich body of work but, briefly, our approach is to see learning and expression as something that is inherently social and developmental. We don't think about learning or communicating as passing around buckets of "knowledge" but instead try to think about the materials, activities and settings through which people construct their own perspectives. A core part of the approach is to work with people to design "objects to think with" that - through their creation, critique and use - become personally meaningful expressions.
The things we make are rich little nuggets that can, I think, make it easier to talk about how we come to think and feel the way we do. Every artist has his or her own ways of working, preferences for materials and techniques for sustaining deep and rich discussions. In the realm of constructionist design, we say that these means, materials and methods are just as important as final products - to paraphrase Carol Strohecker, they are important "ways in" to understanding diversity in people and communities.

Do you intend, with TexTales that the outcomes from a community event be something that could be displayed or exhibited? Or does the work only exist when people are interacting with it? (i.e., If a community gather images, and participated in a TexTales event where texts were gathered- would that get displayed- or is the system itself which gets displayed, responding to the different community? What is the artifact?)

This is a great question. With TexTales, I think there are a few different artefacts or things being produced. First, it's good to think about where the pictures came from, who took them, what kind of issues they're focusing on and what people think about them. In a sense, the pictures are the crucial "starters" that set the tone for the installation. With Fatima, we purposefully took a loose approach, encouraging people to choose freely among many different images and issues but, in the future, I think it would be interesting to focus on one or two issues of concern to the community and shoot images for these. So, the images are one kind of "construction". The preparation and arrangement of the images and the initial or "starter" texts is another kind of construction. In a sense, you can think about this as the beginnings of a conversation - what kinds of questions do you want to ask your community and what kind of scope should this installation have?
This framing is very much the result of the participatory design experience that leads up to the installation - it's tightly tied to the images but also the preferences and personalities of the citizen designers. Then, the installation is "published" or released to a community and this is where the fun continues. It's like a big experiment where you get to see how individuals and groups interpret and react to the questions that the designers have asked, either in images or in texts. I think that the best TexTales installation is never really finished - it lives on in the images, the texts and the minds of all the various people who participated or observed.

Considering you are working with a History group, can you tell us about any provisions you are making for archiving, permanently housing, or distributing this work?

We're still thinking about this one. I'll be going back to the History group to see what they'd like to do but my hope is that this would become a kind of living or dynamic archive. I'd hate to see TexTales installations gather dust on a shelf like so many archives. But the main responsibility, I think, lies with the community - if they want to continue the installation, I'd work with them to help them do that but I don't want to be in a position where I'm the main driver behind their archive.

If you had to 'sell' this TexTales system to a community, what would you describe as the benefits? What examples of benefits or 'testimonials' would you give?

I'd say that TexTales is a new way for you to ask questions of your neighbours. It lets you, relatively quickly and easily, use pictures and texts to do a kind of "polling" we don't normally get to do. It's also a way to play with different forms of "literacy" - the best TexTales installation, I think, is one where image and text complement each other in unique ways. It's part public opinion poll, part graffiti, part bulletin board, part photo album - it's up to the community to make the experience as creative as it can be and, ideally, they'll outgrow its current functionality and develop it for themselves. As far as a "testimonial", I'd go back to a photojournalism workshop we ran in Summer 2002 where one of the participants said "with photojournalism, you see the world differently - you notice things you didn't see before". I'd hope that TexTales might play a small part in this, too.

If you did engage the viewers in a critical discussion about aesthetics (such as the imagery, audience, cropping, the relationship between the text and the image, etc) can you describe how you did this? Were these factors important during the work?

We didn't get into this nearly as much as I'd have liked. The discussions Kathy and I had with the women were mainly around the selection and groupings of the images intended for the installation. We talked about how TexTales is a kind of storyboard and some of the participants did experiment with how the ordering of images might represent the sequence of a story. We also talked about broad themes like "children of Fatima" or "architecture of Fatima" but I think we'd need to do much more work to develop these concepts more deeply. I think we discussed the relationship between the image and text instantiated itself in two broad ways: as a caption to the image and as a question to the audience about the image. Again, this would need much more work to explain better but we thought about the texts people sent as being both descriptions of the images and as being conversation starters with the images. I'm currently looking through all the texts gathered - and hope to do this with the History group, too - to see how people combined image and text and what kinds of new styles of "intermodal literacy" might be emerging. This is quite early, though, and needs much more work.

What is more important for you, process or product?

Both have value but, in general, I think people tend to focus on the "what" and not the "how" of things we see in the world. I love beautiful and provocative objects but I also love asking "how'd you make that?" or "why did you make it like that?" I think the same is true for individual perspectives and public opinions - I often find it hard for to understand how individuals and groups come to think how they do but it's much easier if I can somehow understand the history of their thinking. Maybe a lot of issues about individuals, communities, cultures and nationalities would become easier to understand if we could see how they develop and change.

Also- Just curious, did you show the work of Krystof Wodiczko, to the participants, or the historians?

No, unfortunately, I haven't shown Krystof's work to the History group yet. This is a great suggestion, though, and I look forward to talking with them about it.



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