RECYCLING STORIES THROUGH ELECTRONIC DEVICES
VIRTUAL ONLINE GALLERY
Objectives
1. Changing perspective about one’s own work and environment
2. Introducing a topic or a creative technique visual
3. Improving digital skills
4. Improving skills in visual content making, such as photo editing, creating layouts
5. Exploring multiplicity of interpretations
6. Exploring diversity through visual tools
7. Reinforcing self-esteem
Material needed
- smart phones
- photos
- internet connection
- a collection of art photos linked to a specific topic
Time frame
Between 40 and 60 minutes
Drawing is an extremely effective tool for communication, observation, reflection and memorization. The problem is that many of us have learned a couple of things about it that we should never have learned. At some point, in school, drawing stopped being a way of communicating ideas and feelings to do it in a much more "serious" way, through words and writing. On the other hand, probably from other teachers, we learned that we had to be skilled, even talented, to draw.
So, in order to dare to use it again, already as adults, we must first unlearn these preconceived ideas such as that drawing is necessarily an artistic tool, that it must be beautiful or that it is less serious than written expression. This unlearning process must begin long before picking up a pencil, with a different way of looking at things. In the Virtual Gallery activity of RE-STOR-E, you can find a way to identify different types of lines in different images, photos you make and categorize them, compare them with each other such as cross lines, horizon lines, nets of lines, endless lines, etc...
1. Chose a topic that you want your participants to think about and tell them to take photos that could be entitled as, for instance "Lines in dancing in space".
This was the topic of our creative activity when we worked with metal wires to create small mobile sculptures. But, of course, you can choose any other subject concerning environment for instance.
With this photo collection, you can work in two different ways.
Option 1: if you use it as a digital tool to introduce a creative activity, you can create this gallery in advance, so you will have too ask the participants to share the photos with you before the workshop. Your gallery, will be basically a list of the photos made by the participants completed by some additional photos and paintings of well known artists and creators related. to the same topic that the participant‘s pictures. To do this, you will have to make some iconographic research on the net in advance.
When you organise the order of the images in your virtual gallery, try to create interesting associations by putting side by side your participants photos with famous artworks‘ photos or nature photos and images of crafted objects.
The aim is to provoke associations in the participant‘s mind by suggesting them through the layout.
When you display the images, you can begin by telling a a few words about the added images, about what it depicts, about its creator, etc., and then you ask about the following image: ‟Who made it, where and how is it related to the topic?” You can also ask if the person can create a link between the previously presented picture and his or her own photo.
To create your collective virtual gallery, you have different tools at your disposal. We suggest to make an online gallery so that your participants can come back to it later on.
You can use the Miro board or any other freely available white board application or you can also create a page within a website on Weebly, Wix or Wordpress.
Option 2: Following the same steps, you can also create your virtual online gallery together with the workshop‘s participants.
In that case, you can make them improve their digital skills, and let the create their own associations and create links between each other through these the resemblances that they discover in their photos.
They will also practice how to make a nice layout, you can ask them too to edit their pictures by cropping them and by changing their colors to emphasize the connections and resemblances in their photos.
At the end, you can organsie a virtual exhibition tour where your participants will be the guides. Ask them to tell why they decides to put their photos next to another one and what similarities they have discovered between the seemingly different images.
You can ask them to give titles to their photos or to pairs or groups of photos as well as to the exhibition itself such as:
"Skylines and Earth-lines"
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You can also combine this activity with the use of other digital creative tools such as the Stop motion technique or the Video storytelling as we did in the Paris workshop to make the lines really dance...
Check out some further photo associations pictures of our virtual gallery about
"Lines Dancing in Space"
”Blurred Lines”
”Transversal Lines”
”Suspended Lines”
”Shaped Lines”
”Endless Lines”
”Getting lost in a Net of Lines”
”Beyond the Lines”
Recommendations to use"Virtual Online Gallery" with other activities:
Virtual online gallery, as most of the digital tools and activities are adapted to any of the suggested discovery and creative activities.
If you decide to work on the same subject on dancing lines, you can experiment with other techniques, such as metal wires to draw lines and observe them in a different way through the Drawing in space creative activity.