Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

• This activity involves a play between writing and drawing with multiple participants to see how many variables there are in a chain of information, both written and drawn, as the message gets passed down. It can either begin with a text or a drawing by the first participant. If it begins with a text, then the second participant reacts to the first by creating a drawing. The third person, only having access to the drawing and not the original text, then writes a response to the drawing. The fourth person receives that person’s text and creates a drawing based on the information in that text. And so on and so forth until the last person’s response is completed. The texts and drawings are then placed in order and can be followed like the chain of words in the game "Broken Telephone". 
• This activity encourages creative writing as well as drawing, interpretation skills, and the ability to respond to something in a quick but thoughtful way.  

Example:

This project was tested out by Dawson students and faculty for the 2016 SPACE exhibition.

BROKEN TELE/VISION: AN EXPERIMENT IN SUCCESSIVE VISUALIZATIONS   

*Note: the word television combines the Greek tele- “far” to Latin visio “seeing”*. Project link.  

All of the images and texts from this project, here.

*Note: Instead of hands-on drawing, students could alternatively use their phones or computers to create images.

***

Another kind of Broken Tele/vision exercise that is interesting on many levels is outlined by artist Marlon Kroll who is interested in memory and interpretation.

• The class is divided into groups of about five
• Everyone does a simple drawing following any prompt (i.e. draw a memory) for 3 minutes
• The drawing could be figurative or not (ie, the events, people, or location of the memory, or the feeling of the memory)
• Once the timer rings, everyone in the group shows only the person to their right their drawing for 5 seconds and then hides it
• Everyone then has to draw the image that they were shown from memory (for 60 seconds)
• This continues until everyone has done 5 drawings
• Then a discussion ensues! Each person can describe their original drawing (the memory, the feeling, etc), and then the others can explain how they interpreted what they saw, and the feelings that it brought to them.

Some ideas linked with this activity include sharing, active listening, different ways of seeing and understanding things, compassion and empathy, and deep looking.