The Big Bang of Collective Action: Symbols of Our Future
This is part of “The Big Bang of Collective Action”, a nonlinear list essay by me, Jason Wyman, Impact Producer for The Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. It captures in its simple complexity the breadth of The Alliance’s Youth Media Collective Action Initiative.
Each “bullet” in the list contains both a visual code and a story. Some stories are metaphor. Some are poetry. Others are summaries. And even one is a worksheet. It is my humble attempt to synthesize the collective and manifest its wisdom in the form that works best for that collective wisdom.
“The Big Bang of Collective Action” is meant to be read in whatever manner moves you. At the end of this post is a visual table of contents. Click whichever CODE catches your eye or makes you want to click.
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And through this all we must not just develop verbal / linguistic language. We must also develop the deeper psychological language, the language of symbols.
So over dinner, we have hosts hand out a simple worksheet and black sharpies. We request that guests try and draw something in a single stroke. Some follow directions; most don’t. But what is captured speaks to what can’t be named.
Hosts scan those symbols and send them to us. I take the scans and run them through Adobe Illustrator to make the edges pop and to create a uniformity between the images. The vectorized drawings are then transformed into slides and finally put together into a slideshow.
To date, almost 70 symbols have been collected and subconscious patterns are beginning to emerge.
And we present these symbols back to those in The Alliance’s network to make meaning of their deeper psychology, to find the myths of their origins so we can tell the stories of their creation. For if they are symbols of desired futures, then their stories are how we get there.
