My City My Voice isn’t the only public art project to come out of Gately Youth Center. Breathe Cambridge is a multi-year project that incorporates poetic community voices into sound art and will be celebrating the start of a new school year as well as the success of the Breathe exhibit that was on display at Cambridge Arts Council’s gallery all summer this evening. We hope you can make it to our event tonight from 6 - 8pm! It’s an open mic for poets, singers, rappers and musicians.
Yesterday, on our program’s final day, we visited Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler museum. Our tour was guided by the knowledgeable Karin Oen who tailored the visit to fit our summer themes of storytelling and mapping. MCMV and Breathe Cambridge artist Susmit Pudasaini aka Aware was a great help in explaining some of the Hindu art that illustrated the traditional stories of his culture that have been carried from his former home in Nepal to Cambridge today. Traveling through the halls of this museum added a new dimension to our group’s understanding of art after spending the summer creating, performing and sharing our process and products with the community.
“The galleries on the second floor showcase the Sackler Museum’s collections of Asian and Islamic art from 5,000 BC to the present. Objects on display include archaic Chinese jades and ritual bronze vessels, Chinese and Korean ceramics, and Buddhist sculpture from India, China, and Korea, alongside examples of Islamic ceramic vessels and tiles, and bronzes.” (taken from http://harvardartmuseums.org)
At the My City My Voice art service project we made a time line. A time line is when you create a visual to represent a period of time. It has to have a beginning and an ending. The process of making my time line wasn’t difficult, because I already knew what I wanted my timeline to be about. I made my timeline on the day I had to go home and back to Gately over and over again. I had to put in the most important parts of my day. I had to create a list of events of that day and link them to certain times. Then I made a graph of the list I made. After that I made a map and plotted the routes I took of that day. In conclusion my time line made me realized that everyday I think the same path.- Elo aka Explore
This canvas map is approximately 25’ x 15’ and was created by the youth artists of My City My Voice with guidance from Shea Pilsbury. On the bottom right corner is our map key consisting of the symbols created to represent our artists. Photo taken @ Gately Youth Center by Brandi aka Alive.
Sarah Tuttle is a children’s book writer who volunteered to spend her time this summer with My City My Voice. The time that Sarah spent with us was an amazing learning experience. Some of the things that Sarah taught us were that every story had a conflict. Another thing that she taught us is “The Rule of Three”. “The Rule of Three” is very common in storytelling because in a lot of books there are always three main characters, three locations, or three conflicts. It was a pleasure having Sarah at My City My Voice because it made us become better writers! - Takira Merritt aka AMP
( p.s. everyone check out Sarah’s blog @ http://sarahtuttle.wordpress.com/ there’s a brand new post today!)
Found this while researching storytelling’s presence on tumblr. As we continue to tell our stories in My City My Voice we are looking for new, more interactive ways to use new media tools to create a multi-sensory experience for our audience. This article has some great ideas.
In this Sunday’s Observer, I mention five projects that exemplify the ways the Web is used to tell stories. There are many, many more.
Here are the links to the projects I list i the paper, plus some of the ones that were sent to me via email (aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk) or twitter during the research period.
| — | Aleks Krotoski, “Storytelling: digital technology allows us to tell tales in innovative new ways” (via barefootsong) |
Once upon a time, in the banks of a river, there was a gigantic forest occupied by porcupines. There were many different porcupines living in the forest. Some were big, and some were small. One of them had exactly 367 ¾ spikes on his body. All of the porcupine families in the forest were happy except one. The family consisted of Mama Porcupine and Papa Porcupine, but one problem was that they didn’t have a baby porcupine. This made them sad. However, one very fortunate day, Mama Porcupine found a little baby porcupine, struggling to stand on its little feet. His parents were nowhere to be seen. So, Mama Porcupine decided to take him home. She fed him, nurtured him, and raised him as her own flesh and blood. She named him Spike. Many years passed. Spike was a teenage porcupine now. These days, he was starting to have a problem. While all of his friends started to grow spikes on their backs, Spike didn’t have a single hair on his back. Instead, he had little dots. One very unfortunate day, when he was going to his friends to play like he had done since he could walk, one of his friends,
Phil, walked up to him. On behalf of all of the other porcupines, he said, “Spike, it seems to me that you are not capable of growing spikes on your back. It can be some sort of a disease, but if you don’t grow your spikes the next month, you will not be able to play with us.” Hearing this, Spike was crestfallen. He felt like he was stripped of his clothes, even if he didn’t know what they were. That day, he went to his Mama and asked:
“Mama, why do you think I don’t have spikes on my back? Do you think I have some sort of a disease?”
“Aww, don’t worry about such a small thing!” Mama replied. “One of these days you’ll be
growing the biggest spikes in the forest.”
Making Music. I made the music for the story “Spikeless/Roger” from our performance “I Make Myself Heard”, I had to use a computer to compose a song that will match the mood of the story. For example, there is a part in the story of spike less that he cannot grow his spikes and he feels naked when near people with spikes. So I composed a soft feeling, emotionally down-tone piano for that part, but before that part, I had to make something that is a nice feeling so I used some major notes accompanied by some drums, bass, and guitar. It was a good experience trying to make a song that matches the time its was necessary. This part of the program was really fun and I liked working with my fellow employees and staff. - Genesis aka Digital
Symbols
Each symbol is made with a purpose. We made our symbols after looking at mapping symbols and what they stand for. So we started drawing our own symbol. They represented us and our “Word in me”. The “Word in me” is a process where you have one person stand up on a chair and the group gives them a bunch of words that describes that person. After the process of generating words, the person picks three words out of that list and the one that sounds the best out of the three is their word. The word presented us as we are and what we stand for. This process soon led to making our symbols.
My word was Alive. In the process of making my symbol was complicated, because I had to think of objects that revolve around my “Word in me.” There weren’t a lot of things I could think of. So I combined two things together to make up my symbol. At first when I drew it out, it didn’t look anything like what I pictured in my head. So I made it look more simplified with fewer lines, and it came out to look really good. - Alive
