Karyna's Response

[Robert Greco]

#392

“Mediation is not to be performed only on one; one is to be actively engaged with mediation, with attending productively to one’s own felt experiences and with learning how to compose media out of those experiences, media for circulating and eliciting engagements with others.” Wysocki, p. 19

I think because composition is not my primary field, my initial reaction to Wysocki’s argument was confusion. But as I read him for the second time, a lot of his ideas began to resinate with me primarily because of their similarity to the dialogical and transactional theories of consciousness that I work with, which are in turn based on the same Marxist and Feminist premises that most of the writings mentioned by Wysocki himself are. For instance, Volosinov and Bakhtin argue that consciousness is embodied language. In other words, our consciousness consists of signs which we embody and share at the same time. To me, new media is just another way to create, share, and embody those signs. It exists as a part of our conscious experiences and therefore is inseparable from it. And yet, we don’t just own that experience. We are experienced by others as much as we experience them. Whatever we produce or compose is done with them in mind and influenced by them, directly or not. In other words, Wysocki’s idea of mediation being both productive and passive holds true to me on the very basic levels of conscious functioning, with media constituting a new medium for that functioning.

With this, I would say high-theory point in mind, I reflected on my own teaching. Mostly, I asked myself: “what does it actually mean to compose?” As a statistics teacher, I began to wonder can students compose in my classes. Is data visualization a form of composing? Is data interpretation a form of composing? I would argue yes! As one works with data, he or she tells a story that data arises in one’s mind. This is exactly where new media allows us to bridge the disciplines and break the binaries. It allows us to compose without language, through visual media. As Wysocki argues, it allows us to engage our senses beyond mere vision. But most importantly, it allows us to connect the body with the work done in class.

 

[Author]

Posts