Big Blue Ball - Pictures, People, Place: An Intercultural Playground for Creative Conversations

Big Blue Ball - Pictures, People, Place

Donna Wright

VOLUME 4, NUMBER 2

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES http://www.Humanities-Journal.com First published in 2006 in Melbourne, Australia by Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd www.CommonGroundPublishing.com. © 2006 (this paper), the author(s) © 2006 (selection and editorial matter) Common Ground Authors are responsible for the accuracy of citations, quotations, diagrams, tables and maps. All rights reserved. Apart from fair use for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act (Australia), no part of this work may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. For permissions and other inquiries, please contact <[email protected]>. ISSN: 1447-9508 Publisher Site: http://www.Humanities-Journal.com The INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES is a peer refereed journal. Full papers submitted for publication are refereed by Associate Editors through anonymous referee processes. Typeset in Common Ground Markup Language using CGCreator multichannel typesetting system http://www.CommonGroundSoftware.com.

Big Blue Ball - Pictures, People, PlaceAn Intercultural Playground for Creative Conversations

Donna Wright, Southern Cross University, Australia

Abstract: Big Blue Ball – Pictures, People, Place is an arts based research project that actively engages creative dialoguewith a diversity of cultures through individuals responding to pictures. By activating the creative function, the projectexplores how meaning can be reconstructed through inter-cultural exchange. Project members are recruited from aroundthe world. They are provided with a selection of six ambiguous, visual texts and are encouraged to locate a preferredmeaning using the communication tools of the visual and creative arts. These selected images have been digitally modified,lifting them out of their original semio-cultural context. Participants are asked to interpret the images, with little cues asto the direction they are to take; only that each has the opportunity to freely navigate and locate their preferred interpretationsby drawing on their familiar cultural systems, cultural memory codes, social practices and language structures. Culturalsemiotics suggests that because of the heterogeneous nature of cultural conventions, and the absence of a common culturalmemory code, negotiations of meaning will be triggered during the interpretation process. Stimulated by contextual ambiguity,a collision and/or interaction of different ‘meaning spaces’ already formed in participants by imbedded cultural memorycodes may activate cultural exchanges of imagination allowing for novel constructions of meaning to emerge. The projectextends itself, by way of continuing dialogue between myself, as researcher and visual artist, and project members, throughmy own creative responses to negotiated interpretations, making specific use of the communicative method of hand madepicture making. The conference presentation includes an interactive, visual display of project outcomes.

Keywords: Intercultural Dialogue, Creative Arts, Cultural Identity, Cultural Semiotics

TODAY, YOUNG ADULTS move acrossthe earth in increasing numbers; to learn, towork and to play. The world is in the processof a new, global migration that is transitory

and ephemeral. Acculturation is neither obligatorynor is it necessary. Intercultural proficiency allowsfor understanding to take place momentarily. If thisis ‘globalisation’, how does it affect our meaningsystems? How are we, as many cultures, constructingmeaning and from where do we draw our commonimpressions? Big Blue Ball - Pictures, people, placeis a research project with a difference. It relies onthat which is common in all of us, regardless of ourcultural systems, our social practices and ourlanguage structures. It uses art as a bridge toengaging dialogue with the world. Art speaks acrosscultures and generations. It is an accompaniment tothe human journey, guaranteeing life’s vitality byproviding a communicative language for explorationand inquiry into all that presents itself to us. It is notmerely imitation. It is the creative function at play.And so, Big Blue Ball - Pictures, people, placebecomes an intercultural playground for creativeconversations.Big Blue Ball – Pictures, people, place is a

practice based research project that actively engagesdialogue with a diverse range of cultures throughindividuals responding to pictures. The project

creatively explores how meaning can bereconstructed through cross-cultural exposure andintercultural exchange. Through a process of activeengagement with cultural diversity, and assisted bythe communication tools of the visual and creativearts, the project’s aim is to allow for the emergenceof hybridised interpretations that may come intobeing from the collision and/or interaction ofdifferent meaning spaces already formed inparticipants by imbedded cultural memory codes.Through reflection, creativity is stimulated, allowingthe imagination to express new ideas.

Cultural texts, in the form of visual images, ormore specifically, synthetic pictures made fromphotographs, are provided to participants forinterpretation (fig.1). These selected images havebeen manipulated and modified through a digitalediting process that has lifted them out of theiroriginal semio-cultural context, thereby increasinguncertainty and ambiguity in meaning generation.Because of the hetrogenous nature of culturalconventions, and with the absence of a commoncultural memory code, the expectation is that thecreative function will be activated, triggeringnegotiations of meaning during the interpretationprocess. The project has been active for two yearswith project participants drawn from a broad culturalcross section of the global community; to date the

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 4, NUMBER 2, 2006http://www.Humanities-Journal.com, ISSN 1447-9508

© Common Ground, Donna Wright, All Rights Reserved, Permissions: [email protected]

project consists of 130 members from 75nationalities. The project is open ended and continuesto recruit new members each week. The selectedcultural texts are provided to participants as A-4colour reproductions and in digitised format.Participants have the opportunity to freely navigateand locate their preferred meanings by drawing on

their familiar cultural systems, social practices andlanguage structures. To date, project members havewritten descriptives, poetry, narratives and free wordassociations; in English and in their first language.Paintings have been produced, digitised images havebeen created, images have been hybridised and otherpictures and photos have replaced them.

Figure 1: Eight images were produced for the project. A random selection of six images are provided to eachparticipant. Participants are asked to provide one interpretation for each image, however, they are free to utilise

a range of creative processes to express their ideas

The project is extended, by way of a continuinginterchange of ideas through visual dialogue betweenmyself, as researcher and artist, and project members.Making specific use of the communicative methodof hand made picture making, my own creativereflections of negotiated interpretations are recordedon small, magnetic-backed, wooden blocks, 100 x100mm in size (fig.2). This process is seen as aconstructive expansion of cultural perspectivestowards diversity awareness. As interpretations arecollected from around the globe, visual components

are dialogically explored, and associations are madethrough the intertextual relationship between theoriginal texts, creative responses from projectmembers, and myself as researcher and artist. Havingprior knowledge of the original visual texts, theblocks are allusionary, implicitly referencingparticipants’ responses through an understanding oftheir means of production. They therefore provide asynchronic process between the original texts andparticipants’ interpretations.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES, VOLUME 432

Fig 2: Hand painted wooden blocks form a continuing dialogic interchange between researcher and participants

These hand-painted pictures provide a set of semioticbuilding blocks that can be renegotiated by passingspectators. Over 300 blocks will be available; piledon a table, interlocutors can continue the communi-cation process by moving the blocks around on thetable and up the wall, constructing new ideas andnew meanings. Like fridge magnets or children’sABC blocks, forming and reforming a continuingand dynamic discourse, both with the original textsand with the cultures represented in the project,spectators engage in constructing a communicationchain around the world.

Responding to the selected texts in an artisticmanner using the communication technologies

developed within the creative and visual arts hasencouraged the expansion of creative possibilitiesby offering participants the opportunity to search outa broader range of representation that can moreadequately reflect their ideas. Making specific useof visual expression and artistic language as a vehiclefor investigation dynamically activates creativeprocesses. The creative function is considered auniversal quality of human expression, indeed of alllife form, therefore, through these creative processesfresh ideas about how meanings are negotiated in acontemporary lifeworld can emerge.

The use of pictures and picture-making was chosenfor this research project because as cultural objectsthey activate a process of communication thatinherently contains both an interpretive ambiguitywhich promotes a certain unpredictability, and an

intertextuality, that together promises innovation.Pictorial semiotics posits that there is a specificityto picture meaning that can reveal the way in whichmeaning is conveyed by pictures in contrast to alinguistic approach (Sonesson 1992). Cultural

33DONNA WRIGHT

semiotician, Yuri Lotman (1990) places art as asecondary modelling system which, while based onnatural language, is of another superstructural order,redistributing the primary logic of languageaccording to new logical rules, thus creating newcognitive possibilities and novel constructions ofmeaning (Kristeva 1994).

Based on Lotman’s theoretical foundations ofcultural semiotics, a common translation of theproject’s selected texts will not be possible becausethe images will be exposed to variant culturalmemory codes. Because of the heterogeneous natureof cultural conventions, and the absence of a common

cultural memory code, the creative function isactivated in participants, triggering negotiations ofmeaning during the interpretation process. Stimulatedby this contextual ambiguity, the confrontation ofdifferent meaning spaces already formed inparticipants by imbedded cultural blueprints forcesthem to search out approximate equivalences, therebyactivating exchanges of imagination that allow forinnovation in meaning creation to flourish (Lotman1990). This process exposes participants toopportunities for enhanced creativity and diversitygeneration through the practice of re-imaging,refashioning, and cross-interpretation.

Fig 4: A sample selection of participants’ visual interpretations in response to Image 1

Cultural semiotics postulates that human meaningsystems or semio-cultural spaces are immersed inand constrained by an all encompassing semiosis,which Lotman (1990) has identified as thesemiosphere. The semiosphere as established inUniverse of the Mind (1990) has been described(Clark 1992) as the thinking structure that surroundsus. Vladamir Alexandrov (2000, 2) expressesLotman’s view of a semiosphere as the notion of ourplanet being ‘enmeshed in a vast and multileveledpolyphony of voices, texts and languages’. Ourmeaning systems or semio-cultural spaces are in

constant contact with texts coming in from othercultures. These incursions variously effect theinternal structure of the worldview of each of theaffected cultures by providing a continual processof collision, interaction, transaction, transition andrenewal (Lotman 1990, 126). Thus, the semiosphereis not a single coding structure but rather a multi-level, highly complex and adaptive conglomerate ofinterconnected but different social sub-systems andsemio-cultural spaces marked by a diversity ofcommunication elements or networks, andspecialized functions. Lotman proposes that the



semiosphere is ‘the result and the condition for thedevelopment of culture’ (1990, 125).

Lotman suggests that a text, meaning any humancommunication practice, ‘is always created bysomeone and for some purpose and events arerepresented in the text in an encoded form’ (Lotman1990, 217). In this way culture is shared as implicitand learned human behaviour. Cultural memoryevolves as a coded system over generations andencompasses the embedded and transferable valuesand beliefs of a culture. Meaning is encoded intobelief systems which are value laden and affect theactions of the individual and the individual’s capacityto create meaning. Therefore, human thought andbehaviour are culturally patterned and passed on asnormative values and ideals to future generations.Howard Bloom (2000, 42) sees this ‘conformity

enforcement’ as one of five essential elements of a‘collective learning machine’. Jordon Zlatev (2003)suggests that conventional value systems are overlaidonto the existing hierarchy of meaning systems of aculture. Human communication, particularlylanguage, is therefore conventional and systematic.Cultural memory codes form a patterning ofinterrelated ideas, symbols and behaviours that caneasily be shared, learned and transmitted cross-generationally. John Bodley (1994, 8) notes thatbecause of this cross-generational quality of cultureit can be characterised as a ‘superorganic entity,existing beyond its individual human carriers.’Bodley draws on the premise shared by AlfredKroeber (1987), that ‘each individual is born intoand is shaped by a culture that pre-exists and willcontinue to exist well after the individual dies’.

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Fig 6: Visual interpretation of Image 8

However, humans also have the ability to reflect oninformation and construct new meaning. In fact, asZlatev (2003) has noted, it is the conventionality ofthe meaning systems of a culture that allows for morecreativity in the human being and thus more freedomto reflect and construct. Creative intelligence, or thecreative function, is activated and is present when atext comes into being from this process of reflection.The second of Bloom’s five essential elements of the‘collective learning machine’, is diversity generation,which plays a vital part in this creative process ofdesigning and constructing new variations inmeaning (2000, 46-70). Whilst culture is complex,it is the epigenetic ability to encode cultural memorythat allows each generation to integrate newinformation from the periphery and to build into thesystem new ideas and new values. As Bloom notes,‘conformity and diversity work together for thebetterment of the larger whole’ (2000, 53).

Of particular interest to the Big Blue Ball projectis the notion of a shift in focus from the text to itsperiphery, where the text is influenced by culturalengagements. It is this idea of a culture’s peripherythat the project draws on to provide a methodologyfor generating new information. Untranslatabilityincreases from the centre of a semio-cultural spaceto the periphery where culture comes into contactwith other cultures (Lotman 1990). The centre of aculture can be seen as Bloom’s ‘conformity enforcer’where ‘enough cookie-cutter similarities’ are stamped‘into the members of a group to give it an identity…’(2000, 42). However, while the system gainsadvantage in greater structural organisation, it losesits principles of uncertainty which ‘provide it with

flexibility, heightened capacity for information andthe potential for dynamic development’ (Lotman1990, 128). This is most conspicuous in the centrebecause this is where systems become normalised.Semiotic dynamism is reactivated in the field oftension built up on the periphery of semio-culturalspaces and this is where new meaning systems comeinto being.

The peripheries are the frontier areas, wheresemiotic diversity is intensified because there areconstant invasions from the outside. As Lotmannotes, ‘Any culture is constantly bombarded bychance isolated texts which fall on it like a showerof meteorites […] Not the texts which are includedin a continuing tradition which has an influence onthe culture, but isolated and disruptive invasions […]They are important factors in the stimulus of culturaldynamics’ (Lotman 1990, 18). Lotman also arguesthat ‘the function of any boundary […] is to control,filter and adapt the external into the internal, [and]this invariant function is realized in different wayson different levels’ (1990, 140). Through thisfiltering process external and unpredictable semioticactivity stimulated on the periphery can becomestructured and internalized and drawn towards thecentre where the system normalises and convertsnew information from the periphery into internalisedcultural conventions. Lotman suggests that the myth-forming mechanism of a culture is controlled in thecentre which constructs and organises texts into anintegrated, structural model of the world, whereas aculture’s peripheral comes into contact with andnegotiates meaning out of structurally independentunits.



The periphery is the border, the fringe, the outsideedge. It is the boundary that separates and dividesthe lifeworld into two parts; the outer from the inner,the external from the internal. The boundaryseparates the known from the unknown, the livingfrom the dead, the village from the forest, citydwellers from the nomads. The boundary is moreoften inhabited by marginalised social groups andsub-cultures. Lotman notes that ‘the peripheral genresin art are more revolutionary than those in the centreof culture’ (1990, 134). When two cultures or twolanguages come into contact with each other it is atthe periphery where their texts are influenced bycultural engagement, and where most semioticactivity takes place.

The project’s methodology draws on the premisethat when two cultures are placed in a situation ofexchange and influence, translation between one andthe other, while necessary, is ultimately impossible,and this precipitates a negotiation process whichresults in the creation of approximate equivalences.Lotman sees these approximate equivalences as ‘oneof the most important features of any creativethinking […] forging new semiotic connections’(1990, 37). As Hilary Clark describes it in her reviewofUniverse of theMind (1992, 3), ‘two aspects make

up any semiotic phenomenon, neither of which canbe fully translated into the other, yet these demandto be translated if the semiotic structure is tofunction’. Clark explains that ‘it is the lack of fitbetween texts, languages, and cultures that createsthe conditions for semantic enrichment, [and] thecreation of new meaning’ (1992, 3).It is thisgenerative process that is essential to cultural changeand diversity.

Gunhild Agger (1999, 16) in his article titledIntertextuality revisited: dialogues and negotiationsin media studies, raises important issues with regardsto intercultural dialogue in contemporary society:

‘The question of cultural transfer has alwaysbeen a pressing matter in a world of inequalityand spiritual combat. And the question does notlose its impact as different cultures increasinglyhave access to other cultures through newmedia. On the contrary, problems of nationalidentity and national culture seem to gain inimportance as media access develops at globaland transnational levels. In this connection itseems to be theoretically consistent to take intoaccount the relations among boundaries, centerand periphery, simultaneity and

37DONNA WRIGHT

history/memory, different ways of negotiatingand adapting foreign cultures…’

Big Blue Ball - Pictures, people place provides acreative space for exploring diversity by exploitingintercultural peripheries. It becomes a playgroundfor interaction with ambiguity, and so allows forexpressions of new experiences, and increases thechance of new understandings to emerge and beshared. The project does not aim at building commonidentity, rather, as a space accepting of

indeterminacy, it invites multiplicity of interpretation.It does not intend to draw definitive assumptions,nor does it attempt to establish a set of criteria formaking sense of communication, meaning andinterpretation. Instead, through its reflectiveengagement with the world, outcomes may providefresh ideas about the distinctiveness of contemporaryhuman communication processes, and the possibleemergence of new and adaptive cultural conventionssupportive of this more complex, global lifeworld.

Fig 8: 300 small, hand-painted wooden blocks are made available to the public via a series of interactiveexhibitions

Big Blue Ball - Pictures, people, place embracesdiversity generation and so has taken on a rhizomaticcharacteristic, expanding its potentiality forexploration into human interaction and communica-tion. Project outcomes will be published as a seriesof artists’ books and will be represented in art based,public exhibitions, enhancing access to a wideraudience, thereby providing knowledge of the diverseexperiences, identities and viewpoints of a vibrant,global population. A dedicated website is currentlyunder construction affording an accessible mediumwhere dialogue can continue to generate new ideasin a less structured arrangement where spontaneouscorrelations and discoveries can flourish.Through aseries of international exhibitions, these expanding,

intercultural conversations can travel around theworld. The interactions between the hand-paintedblocks and spectators will be visually recorded; eachnewly formed narrative building up a complexdialogue that will be edited as an animated, digitallyformatted presentation (fig.8). This open, creativeexchange will provide an evolving forum for newvoices and viewpoints. The project’s collective andinclusive approach to broad based interculturaldiscourse ensures a diversity of human interactionsthat can provide for the opportunity to add value tocontemporary meaning systems development andadaptation within today’s transmigratory andtechnologically networked global community.

References

Agger, Gunhild. “Intertextuality revisited: dialogues and negotiations in media studies.” Canadian Aesthetics 4 (Summer1999), <http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/vol_4/gunhild.htm>

Alexandrov, Vladimir, E. “Biology, semiosis, and cultural difference in Lotman’s semiosphere.” Comparative literature(Fall 2000): 52, 4; Academic Research Library p. 339.

Bloom, Howard. Global Brain: The evolution of mass mind from the big bang to the 21 st century, New York: John Wiley& Sons, Inc., 2000.

Bodley, John, H. Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Pub. Co.,1994.

Clark, Hilary. “The Universe of Interpretations.” The Semiotic Review of Books 3 (1992): 6-8,<http://wwww.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Clark-Interpretations-Lotman-Eco.html>

Ebsick, Peter. “Samurai art of yabusame”, National Geographic, July 1996, p45.


Klein, Christopher. “Peru’s ice maidens”, National Geographic, June 1996, p7.Kristeva, Julia. 1994. “On Yuri Lotman.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 109(3): 375-376, <

http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/kristeva.htm >Kroeber, Alfred L. “The Nature of Culture.” Perspectives in Cultural Anthropology”. Edited by Herbert Applebaum. Albany:

State University of New York Press, 1987, p. 80–84.Lotman, Yuri. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990.Sonesson, Göran. “The semiotic function and the genesis of pictorial meaning.” In Center/Periphery in representations and

institutions. Edited by Eero Tarasti. Imatra: International Semiotics Institute, 1992, pp. 211-256, <http://www.arthist.lu.se/kultsem/sonesson/ImatraCourseTx1.html >

Tomaszewski, Tomasz. “Gypsies – the outsiders”, National Geographic, April 2001, p95.Zlatev, Jordan. 2003. “Meaning = Life (+ Culture): An outline of a unified biocultural theory of meaning.” In SGBWP5:

Working Papers of the Project, Language, gesture and pictures from the point of view of semiotic development,Department of Linguistics and Phonetics. Sweden: Lund University, <http://www.lucs.lu.se/People/Jordan.Zlatev/Papers/eoc.4-2.pdf >© Donna Wright 2006

About the AuthorDonna WrightA practising visual artist for over 18 years, Donna has been educating adults for 15 years, working in the areasof contemporary arts practice, community development, Aboriginal adult education, and has now been lecturingin communication and cultural studies for the past four years at Central Queensland University's internationalcampuses. Donna's Master's research investigated the relationship between the development of non-iconographicabstract painting in the 20th century and an ontology expressive of acute flux within the evolution of ourcontemporary western consciousness. Donna's current PhD research project actively engages creative dialoguewith a diversity of cultures through individuals responding to pictures. It is primarily a creative exploration intohow meaning can be reconstructed through cross-cultural exposure and inter-cultural exchange. Donna's interestlies in reviving the communication tools of visual and creative arts practice by placing them into a position toact as a vehicle for fresh and innovative approaches to our continuing investigations into the humancommunicative process and its complex systems of mutual understanding.

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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES EDITORS Tom Nairn, RMIT University, Melbourne. Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Patrick Baert, Cambridge University, UK. David Christian, San Diego State University, California, USA. Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Hélène Cristini, International University of Monaco, Monaco. Mick Dodson, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Hafedh Halila, Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis, Tunisia. Ted Honderich, University College, London. Paul James, RMIT University, Australia. Moncef Jazza, Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis, Tunisia. Eleni Karantzola, University of the Aegean, Greece. Bill Kent, Monash Centre, Prato, Italy. Krishan Kumar, University of Virginia, USA. Ayat Labadi, Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis, Tunisia. Greg Levine, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Fethi Mansouri, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Juliet Mitchell, Cambridge University, UK. Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne, Australia. Scott Schaffer, Millersville University, USA. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Stanford University, USA. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University, USA. Giorgos Tsiakalos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Siva Vaidhyanathan, New York University, USA. Hortensia Beatriz Vera Lopez, University of Nottingham, UK. Chris Ziguras, RMIT University, Australia. Please visit the Journal website at http://www.Humanities-Journal.com for further information:

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Big Blue Ball - Pictures, People, Place: An Intercultural Playground for Creative Conversations

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