THEORY

the big blue ball story

Big Blue Ball: Pictures, people, place

Dr. Donna Wright

Big Blue Ball: Pictures, people, place is a continuing, practice-led research endeavour that investigates the making of meaning in a contemporary intercultural lifeworld, where global cultural flows are increasingly interconnecting and transforming our societies. Through the development of a practice-based research strategy that draws on the visual and creative arts, Big Blue Ball builds on our understandings of both the nature of meaning making and the significance of creativity and creative practice in setting up sites that can support innovative thinking about contemporary cultural issues.

The project began in 2004, actively engaging dialogue with a diverse range of cultures through individuals responding to pictures. Project participants have been drawn from a broad cross section of the global community; over 100 young adults from more than 90 nationalities have now taken part in the research to date and it continues to regularly engage new members from around the world. Participants in the research are young adults between the ages of 18 and 40 years; most are in their twenties. The exchange has been focused at all times towards a respect and appreciation of the voluntary nature of the contribution by participants, and the emphasis on play and the inclusive celebration of individual expression.

A selection of eight specifically adapted images, referred to as primary cultural texts , are provided to project participants for interpretation. These images have been modified through traditional painting techniques and a digital editing process that has lifted them out of their original semiocultural context, thereby increasing uncertainty and ambiguity in meaning generation. Stimulated by this contextual ambiguity, cultural interchanges of imagination allow for novel constructions of meaning to emerge and be shared.

The collection of eight primary cultural texts are provided to participants in the form of electronic images and A-4 colour photocopies. This offers project members the opportunity to explore creativities by making use of a range of visual communication devices and techniques. It has also provided a dynamic and open environment where co-operation and reciprocity may flourish without any single viewpoint dominating.

Project participants are asked to interpret the primary cultural texts that have been supplied to them, but are given little cues as to the direction they are to take, only that each has the opportunity to freely navigate and locate their preferred meanings by drawing on their familiar cultural systems, cultural memory codes, social practices and language structures. Participants are given the opportunity to utilise visualisation strategies to shape their ideas and inform their actions. Through reflection, creativity is stimulated, allowing the imagination to express new ideas.

Through engagement with cultural diversity, and assisted by the communication tools of the visual and creative arts, the project has allowed for the emergence of hybridised interpretations brought about by the collision and/or interaction of different meaning spaces already formed in project participants by embedded cultural memory codes. Because of the heterogeneous nature of cultural conventions, and with the absence of common cultural memory codings, the creative function is activated, triggering negotiations of meaning during the interpretation process. As the creative function is considered a universal quality of human expression, indeed of all life form, the project exploits creative processes so that fresh ideas about how meanings are negotiated in a contemporary lifeworld can emerge.

A range of qualitative research methods has encouraged the use of responsive processes of inquiry found in the arts and the humanities. In particular, creative and visual art practice based research methods have provided an interactive, reflective, analytical context in which to draw out new knowledge and understanding. The research strategy for the project has relied on the experience of art making and creative dialogue as an essential element for knowledge creation because the multidimensional quality of visual arts and creative arts practices can enhance the potential for breaking down cultural barriers, providing a situation conducive to setting up sites for shared understanding. This in turn encourages discoveries about creation and interpretation as cultural and individual expression.

The primary purpose of the project is to actively seek out and engage with cultural diversity, to encourage discourse and the sharing of ideas in order to communicate more effectively and equitably across cultures and in an increasingly complex interconnected world. The project utilses multiple, visual semiotic sites, effectively providing a series of platforms from which to explore transcultural discourse and from which to build on understandings about our contemporary, global lifeworld. With the project's emphasis on creativity and creative practice the project is set up like a game, an intercultural playground, where the accent is clearly on play and enjoyment of the process.

Seeing and knowing through images and negotiating the visual world is part of everyday experience regardless of nationality. Project members have responded by writing poetry, descriptives, narratives and free word associations; in English and in their first language. Paintings have been produced, digitised images have been created, images have been hybridised, and other pictures and photos have replaced them. These interpretations collected from around the world are presented here as an ongoing snapshot of our contemporary intercultural lifeworld.

The third stage of the research extends the project by means of a continuing interchange of ideas through visual dialogue between myself, as artist and researcher, and project members. Creative reflections of negotiated interpretations are recorded as miniature paintings on small, magnetic-backed, wooden blocks, 100x100x10mm in size. As interpretations are collected from around the globe visual components are dialogically explored and associations are made through the intertextual relationship between the original texts, creative responses from project members, and myself as researcher and artist.

Over 200 of these miniature imagetexts have been produced and are made publicly available at various exhibiting sites. Each hand painted block indicates a selected fragment of the whole of a participant's interpretative expression. Arranged as an interactive semiotic playground, the public has the opportunity to continue the communication process by engaging with the blocks, moving them around on the table and up the wall, allowing for fresh ideas and meanings to emerge and re-emerge as an ongoing creative dialogue. Like fridge magnets or children's building blocks, they can be formed and reformed facilitating a dynamic discourse that connects the player by association to the original primary cultural texts, the intercultural interpretations, the individual participants, and therefore to the cultures represented in the project.

Because of the organic and open ended nature of the research the presentation of project outcomes has required a shift in focus from the traditional exhibition methodology towards a more mobile, interactive and international approach, therefore this website has been developed to better meet the needs of a contemporary global audience.

As an international research endeavour Big Blue ball has been designed to encourage discoveries about creation and interpretation as cultural and individual expression, both from those involved as participants in the inquiry and from the researcher, as arts practitioner. Through the specific use of the media of visual culture Big Blue Ball: Pictures, people, place has effectively placed visual and creative arts practice in a position to act as a vehicle for innovative approaches to our continuing investigations into the human communicative process and its complex systems of mutual understanding.