Our Goal

Our goal is to engage in this creative process while simultaneously exploring the intellectual and artistic history of others who have explored similar questions. There are at least four overlapping threads of background material that will support and inform the work of both student groups, as they proceed towards and through the video exchanges.

1. Cultural, historical, and geographical background of the culture with which the students are working.

2. A history and survey of Western, and particularly US alternative media, especially independent and personally produced films that have strong autobiographical aspects, as these can serve as models and touchstones for the works produced in the class. A bridge will also be made between the surrealist films of the '20's and the avant-garde films of the '50's to the present. These works speak to the uniqueness and artistic value that small, non-commercial productions can have, which is a critically important piece of knowledge to students who's main viewing experience is often high-budget features and television.

3. An exploration of the tools, methodology and history of Anthropology, which has been the academic discourse most closely tied to the understanding of other cultures. We will ask you to become anthropologists, to learn a critical way of thinking about and viewing others and ourselves. Moreover, anthropologists have a long history of working with artists and incorporating experimental methods into their work. This aspect of the project will allow us to engage the intellectual discourse that surrounds the work that we will be undertaking, and it will hopefully also give us the tools to analyze the work that our creative exchanges produce.

4. A brief overview of travel as both metaphor and actuality in our lives, as the work that we will be doing in this project is a form of "virtual travel," and as travel is one of the dominant metaphors of film and literature. Particularly during the current era of globalization – when peoples, products, ideas, visual images and emails traverse the globe at amazing speeds – travel is one force transforming all cultures around the world.

Our Tools of the Trade

We will utilize video as our primary tool in this endeavor, but we will apply it in a very unusual way. In the 1920's, influenced by Freud and Jung, a group of artists and intellectuals called the Surrealists explored ways of collaborating to produce art and poetry. They developed methods, sometimes taken from children's games that they believed would allow them to contact one another more directly, bypassing personal and cultural boundaries.

During this project, we will adapt the most famous of these Surrealist games, called "The Exquisite Corpse," to our purposes of cross-cultural exchange. The basic principle of this game is that one person begins to create a poem or drawing, which is then passed on to a second person (and sometimes to many more people!) until it is completed. Often, the latter people in the chain are not shown all that was created before them, so they are only reacting to an aspect of what came before. In any case, the structure involves a series of responses to prior artistic gestures, for as long as the process continues.

For this project, we will first work through the written word, and later through video, to develop dialogues between a group of students at Purchase College and a similarly aged group of students at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Mexico and Bilgi University in Istanbul, Turkey. We will utilize email and the Internet to write stories and develop video scripts, which will in some cases later be produced. We will also create videos collaboratively, without prior scripts, where students in each country will create short scenes, send them across the Internet to their partner, who will respond by shooting and editing a scene of their own. This process will continue to echo for an extended period of time, gradually creating a cross-cultural audio/visual weaving.

What is culture?

Culture is that part of our behavior and beliefs that we generally share with our peers, but which often remains invisible to us. Our own culture becomes visible only when we encounter a person with somewhat different cultural values, or when we try to understand the product of these values such as art or media made by people from cultures different than ourselves. In this case we may either not understand what we are seeing, or we may misinterpret it through the filter of our own culture. But, as we begin to understand the way others think and behave, our self-awareness grows through comparison, and we can reflect more deeply about our own culture and about ourselves. Acquiring such knowledge is the central purpose of this project.

There are many ways to gain knowledge of other cultures. To some degree we can learn through books and films that describe and depict different cultures' values and behaviors. Anthropologists write highly descriptive studies of different cultures called ethnographies, and reading such texts is one way to learn about the world. Visual anthropologists take photographs, and make movies and videotapes of the people and places that they study, and these audio/visual materials can help us to see what such contexts look and sound like, and to understand the ways in which we are different from (and sometimes the same as) other peoples.

Traveling is another way to experience the world in a very direct way. However, many people travel within such limited, touristic routes that they may not encounter much cultural difference at all! Nevertheless, putting oneself into an environment away from home can always open one's eyes to other possibilities. The key is to be open to the differences one finds by engaging them on their own terms - not at arm's length from the windows of a tour bus - but up close, where there can be real interaction.

It is not always possible to travel or to meet people from other parts of the world, and the travel books, ethnographies and ethnographic films that we can view have no interactive element, limiting their ability to place us into the worlds they attempt to describe. For this reason, in this project, we are undertaking an experiment where we will make contact with another group of students, living in another country and culture, in a way that we hope will be interactive enough, that both groups will truly be able to experience the world of their partners far away, and thereby learn more about the world and themselves.