Verde Smoke

As I sat in a meeting today at the Community Innovators Lab, where I volunteered to help with brainstorm low-cost ways to create interesting content for their Co-Lab Radio blog, I realized I’ve been a bad participatory media advocate.  Because I haven’t blogged myself forever.  I blame Twitter and Facebook, where I spew updates to a very select audience of friends who I assume want to hear 140 characters of what I’m thinking.

Here’s few of the photos I took as a volunteer mentor on a day field trip around Boston with three Peace in Focus youth participants and photographer and workshop supporter, Thaddeus Miles. This community mapping outing was part of a two-week workshop on using photography as a tool for conflict resolution and youth voice, held at Madison Park Village housing development in Roxbury and Northeastern University. Check out the youth’s photo’s on a map on Flickr or the group’s blog at http://peaceinfocus.blogspot.com/

An MIT Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning course (that I’m auditing), entitled Media Technology and Community Building, along with progressive community members, has been meeting twice weekly with a core group of Framingham youth and community activists since April 7th, 2009. The class has been helping the youth to analyze and activate their own social networks, both through classic mechanism and using new media technologies such as websites, cell phones, and user-created audio and video. Using these newly obtained skills the youth were challenged to activate their networks, to mobilize their peers, friends, and community to participate in a game on May 9th, 2009.

I finished up a rough draft of just the imagery of my final essay movies without adding the sound, but the narratives significantly changed as I listened to the audio of the youth and from some short video I had captured from the Lawrence Community Works opening. I decided to use iMovie to keep it simple, rather than try to recreate standard effects in Final Cut. The “past” and “future” obviously had less photos and good audio, but I improvised when I could.

I have to admit, I procrastinated a bit around building the rough draft of my final photo essays.  I had all the pieces (in fact, too many pieces) and ideas, but I felt like I was back in high school again, facing down the insurmountable beast of a final paper of which I had too much I wanted to say.  Usually, once I get into working, it flows easily once I get started but it’s taking that first leap.  With this project, the themes I wanted to cover and the enigma that is Lawrence’s identity seemed like a black hole, that I’ve circling around like a hesitant but curious animal.

I called my self a photographer recently in a meeting for my research work for MIT@Lawrence the other day, and honestly, I felt a little like a liar.

Those of you from my former life, who’ve called me “Teach” and railed at me when I made you edit a story down to one page, might have a chuckle at the thought of me writing a script and storyboards of my own. What’s the old adage…”Those who can’t do, teach”?

This week, I’m sensing that we’re going a bit deeper in our examination of landscape – moving from focus on individual vocabulary and grammar of single sentences to more complex expressions stolen from the realm of poetry.

[10/20/07] This week’s ruminations extend the discussion of significant detail from vocabulary to the grammar of the language of landscape in Lawrence (and Austin actually). Basically, grammar refers here to the rules or formulas employed to communicate meaning using land vocabulary elements such as materials, forms, paths, and processes. And like any good sentence, the meaning is all in how you construct it – its order, its relations, its context in time and space. I see multiple grammars at play in Lawrence: creation, immigration, exodus and reluctant residence.

This week I got into the meat of the work in Lawrence, in that I finally met some residents in a context of social change, at a community meeting and a cultural celebration. As I described last week, I’ve previously tried to taste the context of Lawrence’s landscapes and people by just showing up and walking around.