Best Practices in Representation

 

Mural Painting by Diego Rivera of Tinochitlan 1519

Our guest faculty this week is Dr. Ashley Minner. Dr. Minner is a community based visual artist from Baltimore, Maryland and an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She received her MFA (’11) and MA (’07) in Community Arts, and her BFA (’05) in General Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art. She recently earned her PhD ('20) in American Studies from University of Maryland College Park. Ashley works as a professor of the practice and folklorist in the Department of American Studies at University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she also serves as director of the minor in Public Humanities. She will be working with us on developing best practices in representation.

Here are some links to her work.

ashleyminnerart.com / @ashleyminnerart 

Ashley Minner, Reclaiming Space for the Lumbee Indians of Baltimore - Smithsonian Folklife Magazine

Art AND: Ashley Minner - BmoreArt

 A quest to reconstruct Baltimore's American Indian 'reservation' - The Conversation

 Dr. Minner has asked us to read two texts before coming to class on Tuesday morning.  In addition she has given us a few questions to add to our inventory.  The readings and questions are available on the Activity Page for this week. Please read them.

The Worlds Fair Project

You have completed part one of the Worldbuilding Project for this semester.  The Inventory you have created for your planet/moon has been posted on the Worlds Fair Portfolio Page along with your planet name and a brief selection describing your planet.  It is now time to test your Inventories to see how much they can communicate to someone other than yourself about the nature of life and culture on your world.  If you have created an inventory with a lot of specific detail about your world, you will have likely succeeded.  If you have failed to create an Inventory that communicates in specific detail you will be making someone else's task very difficult when they try to use your inventory to complete their Worlds Fair Pavilion as described below.  You will have to help them to better understand what your ideas are.

The Worldbuilding Questionnaire is not a quiz or a set of propositions to respond to, it is a tool designed to illicit details to help you build a usable world in which stories might unfold.   

The Scenario

Your world is in trouble and you have to help save everyone and everything on it.  If you fail, the world you and your people have come to call home will cease to exist. 

Your scientists have detected serious anomalies in your world's orbit and an increased wobble in its rotation. They have concluded that for some unknown reason your planet has started to break up.  It might be possible for some people to escape before it self-destructs but not everyone and many species native to the planet and its unique ecosystems and environments will be lost.  Fixing the problems is beyond the ability of your world's science. 

But fixing what is wrong with your planet is within the scientific and engineering abilities of  worlds with more sophisticated technologies than yours.  The question is how will your world attract the interest and resources of one of these technology centers?

An opportunity to attract the interest of a planets with the technology that can save you has arisen.  Periodically there is a Worlds Fair, an exhibition of planets and moons that represent a diverse sampling of the Intergalactic Community that celebrates the way in which a variety of worlds have created societies that have implemented The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a summation of humanity's best thinking and best expression of the hopes and aspirations of humans everywhere, and it is linked here for your information. There are currently 30 articles in the Declaration and it is a short and concise document.

Your planet has applied to have a pavilion at the Fair.  Only a limited number of worlds are allowed to have pavilions at the Fair but your world's application has been accepted.  You will be asked to design a pavilion to be constructed at the Fair site that can be visited on the Fairgrounds.  The pavilion will receive both actual and virtual visitors but the technology of the planet that will host the Fair eliminates the difference between actual presence and virtual presence.  All visitors will experience your pavilion as if they were actually there in appropriate bodies that can accept and perceive the experience you have prepared for them.

The purpose of each pavilion is to demonstrate how each world represented has integrated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into its society and culture.  The pavilion is a structure that will house an interactive experience that will allow visitors to experience a selection of environments and experiences that present your world in the best possible way, hoping to create interest and affection for your world so that others might be motivated to reach out and help your world in its moment of need.

But you will not be permitted to design the pavilion that will represent your world.  Instead, the Fair wants to present your world as others might see it.  You will be able to interact with the designer of your world's pavilion, but the final responsibility for what is being represented and how it will be presented is the responsibility of whatever designer is selected to design the pavilion for your world.

Instead you will design the pavilion that will present someone else's world. There will be 28 pavilions and 14 pairs of participants.  There are two ways your world might be saved, either by having one of the best pavilions at the Fair, or by designing one of the best pavilions at the Fair. 

The Tools

The Design for the Worlds Fair Pavilion will be executed as an interactive hypertext story in Twine2.  Ideally by now you will have downloaded Twine2 onto your local machine and will have practiced how to program in the Twine2 environment by taking the "Visitor" Tutorial and/or by using some of the video resources linked to the blog.

Creating a Twine2 story-game will allow you to model how a pavilion will look to a visitor attending the fair providing some of the choices and interactivity that would be part of an actual tour of the pavilion. Over the next few weeks we will provide you with approaches and coaching to help you design this themed environment that is built to embody the world that your work partner has created.  You can consult as frequently as necessary to obtain more and essential details of the world from the person who created it.  The following are the creative partnerships we have assigned for this project.

The Partnerships

The following partnerships have been assigned for this project.  If there is a difficulty or issues that make the pairing impossible or too difficult please consult the instructor immediately.

Aren Agocha and Bridgette Powell
Giovanna Saraiva and Caitlin Griffin
JP Moreno and Jess Lewis
Sarah Benyona and Ashe Mijo
Hailey Ayala and Daleyah Moore
Ray Zhang and Josephine Zhao
Rico Wang and Hanz Ago
Luke Tiday and Leo Zamarripa
Whitney Bryan and Kaelyn Shirley
Kali Brogan and Taylor Stolz
Sydnei Berry and Kara Petzold
Jordyn Buckland and Eve Lindley
Ezra Gaeta and Yasmin Onder
MJ King and Emily Moran

Twine2 Tutorial

Thank you for submitting your Planet Inventories.  We are ready to start the second half of this semester's project.  For this part of the project you need to know how to program a simple hypertext story (game) in Twine2.  We have created some tutorials to help you do this.  

First.  Go to

 https://twinery.org/  

and download the appropriate version (Mac or Windows) for the computer you are using.

When you complete the download the program and install it, it will create a folder called "Twine" in which there will be a folder called "Stories"

Download all the files in the Google Docs Folder linked to the email I have sent to you and put them in the "stories" folder of the "Twine" folder on your computer.

Once these are downloaded make sure you have included the folder for "visitingimages"  and the Visiting storyfile which is an html file.  If you click directly on any html file in this folder it will come up in your browser and you can play it....however

We want to edit the file so start the Twine2 program and on the start page, after you go through some introductory passages which you can read or follow if you like to other resources, the story files will come up in what is you usual start page when you will open the program in the future.

Click on the story called "Visiting" and this is a step by step tutorial for how to code basic interactive passages in Twine2.  The instructions will be in one color and the actual coded sections you will be able to edit are in another color.  Go through the tutorial adding details and learning how to code your passages.   There are several tutorials on line as well and I will link these to the course blog where these instructions will also be listed. 

Fill in the data for Visiting using the information you have assembled for your planet.  Let a potential vistior know something of your planet through the story/game you are creating.  

This "Visiting" tutorial will teach you how to create passages, how to link passages, how to make sure you include return commands to all your passages so no one gets stuck down a dark passage with not way out,  how to add pictures to your passages and how to style text in your passages for different text effects. 

In 48  hours we will issue the second set of instructions for the next tutorial please complete your first tutorial by then.  To help you, Rick Dakan has prepared a cheat sheet of Twine2 basic commands in the file in the stories folder called "Twine basics"  this is not a twine file but a basic text file which you can load into a word processor usually by simply clicking on it.  

Go to the course blog for additional help if you need it.  Email me if you are completely confused...well...you can email me if you are only partially confused but try to figure it out yourself first.

Here are some video tutorials that you might want to look at before you start creating the Visitor story we are asking you to do.  These tutorials cover much of the same ground and even go further as you get acclimated. I recommend looking at the first one first...then doing the Visitor tutorial.  Afterwards you can learn some of the other tricks in the other videos which are short and tweak the look of the text you are creating.

Here are a number of additional tutorials you can access:

This is the most basic work through tutorial for the program to learn its basic function. You may want to go through this tutorial before you do the "Visitor" tutorial although they cover much of the same ground. 
https://twinery.org/wiki/twine2:guide

This is a good tutorial in Twine2 about Twine2

http://selfloud.net/HarloweWorkshop.html

Here are some more advanced tutorials you might want to reference as you get more comfortable with Twine2.

Basic RPG Tutorial 

Part One:
http://lambdamaphone.blogspot.com/2015/02/using-twine-for-games-research-part-ii.html?q=twine

Part Two:
http://lambdamaphone.blogspot.com/2015/03/using-twine-for-games-research-part-iii.html?q=Twine

How to Create a Space Exploration Game in Twine 2 (This is a good relevant Tutorial to what we are going to do)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvOPqJzXWgo

How to Have a Character ask they Player their name

http://twinery.org/questions/1453/how-could-i-have-a-character-ask-the-player-their-name

Tutorial for Macros

https://twinery.org/forum/discussion/2620/a-tutorial-to-twine-macros-if-set-and-click-for-twine-2-0-harlowe

How to link passages in If statements

https://twinery.org/forum/discussion/5166/how-to-link-passages-in-if-statements

How to make a combination lock in Twine2

https://www.instructables.com/id/Building-a-Combination-Lock-in-Twine-2-Harlowe-2/

Building an Inventory System in Twine 2

https://gersande.com/blog/designing-inventories-in-twine-2-with-the-built-in-harlowe-macros/

Twine Cheat Sheet

https://blogs.stockton.edu/textscape/files/2015/04/A-Twine-Cheat-Sheet.pdf

And is a list of Youtube tutorials by Dan Cox that seem useful

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTWJzxNdsIDHiYzGh-2Fd1w

And here is a longer list of Youtube tutorials for the most recent version of Twine 2.3 (Most of us will probably use Harlowe as the story format, it is the default)

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=twine+2.3

Mid-Term Submission

 

It is approaching the time for the submission of your mid-term documents.  To submit your documents, make a folder in Google Drive with your name and Worldbuilding in the title.  In the folder put the following items:

1. A copy of your distant planet image 275px by 275px saved as a png file. (See image assignment parameters below.
2. A copy of your 5:3 image of life on your planet sized 500px. wide by 300px. high.
3. A Pdf file of your Planet inventory including the recent material on Gender and Sexuality.  You pdf file should also incorporate your 500px by 300px. image. Below are the parameters for the Inventory PDF file and the image file parameters.

Submit these documents and place them in your Google Docs folder in such a way as I can download the entire folder.  Email me a link to the folder so I can download it by midnight on Friday, October 16.

Inventory PDF Parameters

Make sure you write your Inventory so that it can be understood by someone other than yourself.  Try to be as clear as you can about the various aspects of your planet so someone else can get as clear an idea as they can about the physical and cultural aspects of your planet. This is a process document that someone else will need to use, so give as much information as you can in the way you would want to receive that information from someone else.

At the top of the page include your name and the name of the planet/moon you are creating. It will help if you organize your inventory in the same topic subdivisions we have used from week to week during the first half of the semester. If you have any confusion over what to do, I will hold a question session after zoom class next Tuesday.

Image Assignment Parameters:

Although much of what we will do in this class this semester is based on writing and the creation of process documents (like a World Inventory) we would like you to create two images to assist our visualization of your planet and its human inhabited ecosystem.

One image will be put at the top of your inventory which will be submitted as a pdf.

This image should be in an aspect ration of 5:3.  Besides using this image to illustrate your inventory, you will need to create a version of the image 500 px. wide by 300 px. high saved as a .png file.  This image should be a wide-view of a place where humans live on your planet incorporating as much of the local ecology as you can show.  

The second image will be a picture of your planet or moon from a distance that will fit in a transparent square 275px by 275 px.  This picture may also be included in your Inventory PDF but will need to be submitted with the Inventory.  This image should be a .png executed on a transparent canvas.  The size of the canvas should be 275 x 275, the image can be round within the square of the canvas.

These images will be due in two weeks when you submit the first versions of your Planet/Moon Inventories in pdf form. The images can be constructed in photoshop, illustrator, or other program you feel comfortable with.  The output for submission is .png.  

Representing Gender and Sexuality

 

This week's presenters are Dr. Helis Sikk and Dr. Lindsay Garcia.

Dr. Lindsay Garcia is a visiting instructor of literature and media studies at Ringling College of Art and Design. She is also a socially engaged artist who works in video, performance, social practice, poetry, and scholarly intervention. Her scholarhsip and artwork engages with anti-racist, interspecies, queer, and feminist materialisms. www.lindsaygarcia.com

Dr. Helis Sikk is a visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at University of South Florida Tampa. 

Before coming to class they are asking you to do the following:

Read: Judith Lorber, “Night to His Day”

Link to article: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LBK6CxUXTwqpk_KmksYwIB67DtUxQ53Q/view?usp=sharing (please use this link instead of one found online)

Read: Adri T., “Myths About Asexuality”

Link to comic: https://adriofthedead.tumblr.com/post/65540442968/okay-i-realize-this-hilariously-late-for

Watch: “5 Non-Binary People Explain What “Non-Binary” Means To Them” 

Bring a gendered object to class and be prepared to describe the ways in which it is gendered (see immediately below for instructions)

Choose an object or group of objects that you see as “gendered” and bring it to our Zoom meeting. This could be an object that is personal to you or something you have picked up from the material environment that you inhabit and experience in your everyday life. Reflect on how this object is used and suggest possibilities for creative uses that may trouble cultural assumptions about what it represents.  

Here are some questions to help you guide your thinking:

What do you see in the object? Write down everything you can about it - color, texture, shape, and style. Who created the object? When? What was the purpose? What does the purpose tell us about the object? How do you use it? Who was the object intended for? What does the intended use tell us about the object? 

In this week's Zoom class we will do the following: 

• Definitions: Gender & Sexuality, in various forms using the attraction dragon & genderbread person
• Breakout Room Activity: Gendered Objects
• Translating this activity into world building
• Best Practice Tips: for considering identities that you do not embody, when it comes to sexuality & gender - plus other intersections (race, ethnicity, disability, species).

This week's questions have been added to the Worldbuilding Questionnaire.  Please begin answering this week's questions to add to your inventory. 

This week's questions are also on the Activity Page for this week along with additional resources.  We look forward to discussing these questions with you on Tuesday morning.

Week 5: Power, Conformity, Authority, Obedience

 This week we will be visited by Dr. Iva Pekova, our full-time professor of Sociology and Social Science who will look at some of the aspects of way societies are organized and function. We will be working out some of the details of how our societies define conformity and deviance, learning how societies treat these issues is what defines patterns of power and authority. 

Dr. Pekova has asked that this week you watch the following 3 videos before coming to class.  All three offer very intriguing insights into human social behavior.  

Dr. Petkova has added a few questions to the Worldbuilding Questionnaire that you should begin to answer about the society you are creating on your world. Go here for this week's Activity Page where you can find some more videos to watch and some questions with which to develop your society.