Topic Areas: Community Network Experiments and Cross-Cultural Issues in Developing Digital City Resources.

Abstract: There are various definitions of culture, ranging from a reference to artistic activities to organizing behavior and shared beliefs that define a group. When referring to 'net-culture' or 'cyber-culture,' many writers on and off-line refer to a politically neutral, race-less and classless territory providing equal access and unlimited participation and interaction. However, many challenge this assessment. Artist Coco Fusco states: "Despite cybercultural claims that we have moved beyond cultural and racial identity, there are particular ways in which the digital revolution participates in globalization's re-drawing the lines that distinguish bodies from each other, rather than erasing these lines altogether."1

Artist Ping Chong's theatrical series "Undesirable Elements" seeks to re-examine culture and identity in the physical world. 2 In the Spring of 1999, students in the Academic Computing Department of Columbia College had the opportunity to bring Chong's ideas, the thoughts of the Chicago community, and their own impressions of cultural isolation and assimilation into the virtual world.

A web site and CD-ROM created by students of Columbia College documents video interviews with over twenty individuals answering questions about personal culture and identity, includes interactive student interpretations of the project, and provides a 'virtual staging' of the theatrical production. 3 In addition, the CD-ROM examines two aspects of culture: physical space (walls, borders, and bridges), and the personal space of the mind (isolation, assimilation, and connection). This article discusses the collaborative process that created the virtual "Undesirable Elements/Chicago."

Introduction: Columbia College Chicago in conjunction with the Academic Computing Department and the Office of Community Arts Partnerships (OCAP), assisted in sponsoring the community project "Undesirable Elements/Chicago."

Ping Chong, a theatre director, choreography, video and installation artist, was invited to produce and present "Undesirable Elements/Chicago" as the Duncan YMCA Chernin's Center's first major production. The project is an on-going series of community-specific works by Ping Chong, exploring the effects of history, culture and ethnicity on the lives individuals in a community. The piece is made through a collaborative workshop process involving Ping Chong and a group of individuals who vary in many ways but share the common experience of having been born in one culture and now being a part of another.

"Undesirable Elements" draws its power from the simple act of naming oneself in public. On one level, "Undesirable Elements" is an emotionally charged challenge to traditional views of culture and the 'other.' On another level, it is a lyrical expression of the astonishing fact of human similarity, difference and indomitability. Since each individual's experience encompasses that of his or her ancestors and culture, the piece is a journey through the turbulent history of the twentieth century from a global perspective." 4

The theatrical piece was first produced during a residency at Artist Space in New York City. Since then, Ping Chong and Company has created original "Undesirable Elements" productions in Cleveland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Southern California, Upstate New York, Newark, Rotterdam, and Tokyo where, under the title "Gaijin" or 'foreigner' it received a 1995 Yomiuri Theatrical Award.

Ping Chong's "Undesirable Elements/Chicago" provided a distinct opportunity to explore the rich ethnic and cultural heritage of Chicago and its many communities. "Undesirable Elements" created a forum for a much-needed dialogue among races, cultures, genders and generations. The Chicago response to the project was astonishing. Over twenty-five community organizations and scores of individuals assisted. Joining Columbia College in partnering with the project were the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chinese Service League, International House, the Center for Arts Policy, the Polish Museum of America, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Beacon Street Gallery and Gallery 37, among others. The involvement of these organizations are proof of the excitement and interest in the dialogue "Undesirable Elements/Chicago" can bring to a city where cultural barriers have existed for so long. The Web/CD-Rom Project: Two courses, Interface and Navigation and Advanced Programming for the Web, in the Academic Computing Department at Columbia College worked on the "Undesirable Elements/Chicago" Web Site and CD-Rom project in the Spring of 1999.

In Interface and Navigation, students traditionally examine human interactivity in three primary areas: cognitive space, physical space, and temporal space. They perform exercises related to these topics in real and virtual space. As a guide and inspiration, the class uses Peter Anders' "Envisioning Cyberspace" as the text. This book examines ways communities and individuals use space to think and how this will influence the design of dimensional cyberspaces.

Space Shapes Identity: Tied with our use of space is our position within it -- objects relate to us as well as to each other. Our position within the space sets our relationship to its contents. It gives us the Big Picture. We are also surrounded by personal spaces, comfort zones and territories that are defined internally. In cyberspace these exist at the same level as physical spaces -- as creations of the mind. 5

The class is held in an advanced interactive media classroom and lab containing 15 Powermac G3 machines and two scanners. In addition, the class has access to CD-Writers, PC machines for cross-platform authoring, and video cameras and capture cards for the incorporation of streaming media. The software applications used in the course are Macromedia Director, Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects. Some students also incorporated work done in Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand.

There are several kinds of projects traditionally done in the class that correspond to the three topic areas. When the class talks about the relationship of time to space, the students do a project in which they each define temporal space by recording twenty events (physical or thought events) that occur during each of the following blocks of time: five days, five hours, five minutes, and five seconds. When the class discusses the abstraction of space and time in the creations of maps, each student breaks down the experience of navigation by taking a trip to a place that they have never to been before. They describe the preparation for the trip in detail, write twenty significant events that occurred while in transit, and draw a "meandertale" map of the travel to the space and the navigation within the space. When the class discusses cognitive space, each student creates a non-linear 2-dimensional map of their personal thought process. Since a thought process may be constantly changing, students can select a particular mode of thought (i.e. sleeping, getting an idea for an artwork, daydreaming, etc.) or a particular span of time.

Other projects relate to cultural perception. For a project about perspective, each student selects a public or private space and creates ten images of different personal or cultural points of view of that space. In this case, they concentrate not only on the physical points of view, but also on the way the space is interpreted. For another project, students create an avatar to represent their cultural identity.

There were ten students in the course in the Spring of 1999. They were from a variety of different cultural backgrounds, reflecting the Columbia College community. One student was from the Philippines, another from Thailand, others were from Greece, Poland, and Chile. Of the three students born in the US, one was a Japanese-American whose parents were placed in internment camps on the West Coast during the second world war. This class examined how the concepts explored by the Anders text and the projects related to their own culture under the umbrella of the "Undesirable Elements/Chicago" project.

In "Undesirable Elements," Ping Chong does not explicitly define culture, but instead invites his audience and cast to define it personally by asking the question 'What is your culture?' By asking this question along with a series of other questions like 'What is home for you?', 'What color are you?', and 'What are things that are good and bad about your culture?'; a human perspective of culture begins to be formed.

Before Ping Chong arrived in Chicago, he sent a series of these questions and others to be used for videotaped interviews at the Duncan YMCA. All the students in the Interface and Navigation course were interviewed, along with many volunteers from throughout Chicago. Excerpts of these interviews became part of the web and CD-Rom.

What follows are some examples of the questions and responses chosen:

Where is home for you?

"I think it's taken me a bit of time to actually claim home and identify home as a place that is a central location for myself, it's no longer a physical location but definitely when I come to Chicago because I resided here for most of my life consistently I consider this home but in my travels there are times when I am physically somewhere and actually spiritually feeling that's home. So home is much more of an internal feeling or internal location rather than a physical location."
-Suzanna

What color are you?

"In America I'm black so therefore I should be with someone black. Black people don't like me. They distinctly know there is something different about me. They just know and it's been that way since I was young."

-Evie

"I look very White I think. I look more like the Russian side and then my father is typical Euro Anglo mutt so you see somebody who looks like me and you don't think that they're going to speak Spanish which is fun because sometimes people will be talking about you in Spanish."

-Nicole

What culture are you?

"I take things from other cultures sometimes in different ways and I sometimes use different languages. Sometimes some languages have one meaning to me. For example when I write, there are some words that come in French or in English. Sometimes when I speak English, I have words that come in my language. Sometimes I think in French. I think it is very difficult to say who I am. In a way I think it is kind of a fragmented self if one can say in terms of culture and identity and in terms of the choice I have made in my life."

-Sonya

From these videotaped interviews and from personal interviews with Ping, six principal performers were selected. The students repeated the interview process with storytellers : Ewa Boryczko (Polish), Brenda Cardenas (Chicana), Davida Ingram (African-American), Oscar Groves (Vietnamese-American), and Cecile Savage (French).

Davida, an African American woman born in the South and re-located to Chicago discusses her experiences:

"It's like a homeless type of feeling that I can have. My mom has land that she grew up on that her family still owns and one day that land is going to be land that she wants me to say that I own too so really feeling like what does it mean for me to have so much of my family deep in Arkansas, Mississippi and really understanding that place when I-sometimes I have revulsions about the South, I don't like the biblical fundamentalists, I don't like the racism that exists down there, I don't like the poverty down there but not going down there looking at the bad things because I can't see things being pitiful in a way. I need to be able to accept it and look at it with joy and to love it. You can't only see the things that make your heart hurt when you're looking at your culture. You have to be able to see the part that allows you to laugh and be happy too but not ignore reality."

-Davida

Brenda was born in Milwaukee to a Mexican mother and German father:

"I tend to gravitate more towards the Mexican side. Maybe that one way that I deal with it but again I feel that natural because that side of my family was so large and they still spoke Spanish, we still ate Mexican food. When I was young at the weddings and the parties they would dance en tapatiyo, the Mexican dances so that was so much more prevalent. There was really nothing German from the other side. So I think partly I deal with the schism by partly gravitating more toward one side but it feels like a natural kind of gravitation."

-Brenda

Cecile left France for New York in the 1960's and traveled throughout the country as a jazz and blues musician:

"I have never found America to be such an international culture. I come also from a big international metropolis which is Paris. This international is separated and not equal. That is my view in what I saw. I have traveled a lot and I have done a lot of thinking also and there is no Heaven on earth. Every place has good parts and deep problems. Paris is no more romantic that Chicago. There are ghettos everywhere, there are beautiful parts everywhere, beautiful people everywhere so I cannot say I am in love with the American culture. It is definitely a culture that has allowed me to express myself and to do what I wanted to do. it's also a place-if I had not lived there I am sure that there are parts of me that would not have developed-that's why I left."

-Cecile

Oscar left Vietnam as a child, and found difficulties in the US through his culture, not only as a Vietnamese American, but as a gay man:

"School has been kind of the marking point of permanence for me because I either don't force myself to leave a place or someone else doesn't force me to leave a place but for a fine amount of time I have to consider this mailing address and this location my home until I figure out what I need to learn from that place. So I had been in Houston or Spring Texas specifically for ten years and Chicago for ten years and I need to find another home. it somehow decades. It causes you to reflect on what you found home here and what home lies ahead of you."

-Oscar

Ewa has been in Chicago for seven years:

"I find answers in my dreams. In doing stuff that I love to do and all these years I always looked forward to being in a moment where I really, I was able to the things that I do and I wasn't able to do at home in Poland which is theater for example and I guess I don't take it as such a bad thing to be away from home. I just think it's a little more challenging."

-Ewa

Later in the semester, the students had the opportunity to meet with Ping Chong to discuss the conceptual basis of "Undesirable Elements." Excerpts from these interviews became a central part of the navigation
for the CD-Rom.

"I see this piece as a way of humanizing people and making other people see the difference, that people are different but often their stories are very similar, that they have a lot of the same experiences and that if we really, if America is not just lip servicing that we are a country where we have-give us your floor, give us your this, everything. If we really believe that a nation that is enriched by all these different cultures then we have to live up to it because we're not. We're saying one thing and we actually don't believe that."

-Ping Chong

This meeting also inspired a fourth thematic area of study to be added to the course: subjectivity. This area included ideas of assimilation and separation. The students also were inspired to expand on the three topic areas, adding ideas about borders, common ground, and emotion. The students created their interpretations of these ideas in an interactive format.

In the other course, Advanced Programming for the Web, students combined their technical knowledge of programming with ideas about culture and technology. They participated in an on-line discussion forum, and designed web sites with JavaScript programming techniques. To begin the discussion of ideas, the class participated in a discussion forum. Here are some of their thoughts from the forum:

"From my personal view I think culture on the web means nothing....Once you sign on your culture has been erased. You are no longer a person but a thing or a number."

-Tom

"There IS a person @ each computer, the web allows for world communication and maybe world peace and understanding. It allows for the absorption of information that may be hard for some people to recognize, understand, or grasp. This keeps the emotions at a safe level for acceptance of other people's lives and cultures. This exchange of ideas will accelerate the evolution of our world."

-Harmony

"I think we can get a general idea of culture from the internet, but not details. It's because we cannot figure out different languages, so that I can not understand French web pages as a Korean. Even though we can communicate with English, but it's hard to understand perfectly for me."

-Shi Ae

"My thinking about web culture is World communication. Wherever you are, you can communicate with people around the world by the internet."

-Wiphawee

One student believed that there were aspects of his culture that were stable and ordered (religion, family) and other aspects that were more changing and chaotic (finances, technology), and designed a site which expressed this dichotomy. Another student was concerned with how people's beliefs were stereotyped in society. He saw assumptions being made about people's values through their physical appearance and his piece for the web is an attempt to challenge these stereotypes but also to challenge the authority of the machine to present an analysis of the intangible. The third project, created by a multi-lingual student, presents a collage of languages in a participatory site.

Conclusion: One thing that Ping Chong's "Undesirable Elements" project does to the viewer is promote an understanding of how two or more cultures can co-exist in one individual. Through participating in the process of the theatrical production (in physical space) and by creating the web and CD-Rom (in virtual space), the students realized that global does not mean general or universal but distributed and layered--a layering that occurs on the macroscopic scale of society but also on the relatively microscopic scale of the individual. They realized that as cultural producers they must allow for and respect multiple layers of identities and unexpected cultural combinations, and ask how virtual spaces can be designed to promote transcendence of the artificial borders between people of different cultures.

Ping Chong describes the definition of 'desirable' as holding power in the society. He has observed 'undesirable' members of a society mimic the behavior and image of the ruling class. This observation begs the question: in virtual societies, what is the 'desirable' element? Who holds the power in the virtual world and how will this power structure structure our relationships within it?

"Digital technology has reshaped the nature of capitalism as a world system; it has redefined the 'post colonial' space via Neo liberal privatization, transnational banking, long distance management and the internationalization of labor; it has reformulated the dynamics of belonging and community in those spaces via telecommunications." 6

By exploring the 'dynamics of belonging' in physical space, with all its complexity and inequity, cultural producers in virtual space can begin to understand the issues present in large scale social systems.

--Scroll down for Footnotes