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FYI Research: |
Before enrolling in Todd Taylor's Multimedia Composition class, Erin Sullivan had never worked with video. Sullivan, an English major, was more comfortable with dependent clauses and direct objects than audio synch and MPEG formats. But she enjoyed the class, and the next semester, in Taylor's Advanced Multimedia Composition course, Sullivan turned what she'd learned into her own documentary. Sullivan interviewed North Carolina artist Bill Bamberger and others involved in Bamberger's project "This House Is Home" to create a 30-minute video -- also titled "This House Is Home" -- which is, in effect, a documentary of a documentary. Bamberger built a mobile gallery and took it on the road, with a two-fold intent: He wanted to give underprivileged and overlooked communities the experience of seeing an art exhibit in a professional gallery, and he wanted the gallery to be a working studio, a place where the artist was available to the neighborhood. Bamberger's first stop was Santa Cruz, which is a low-income, predominantly Hispanic community in the West End of San Antonio, Texas. He set up the gallery and began photographing clients of San Antonio Alternative Housing, which helps low-income families buy houses. Bamberger's photos of these residents soon began to line the walls of the gallery, and people in the community gradually became less wary of him and more interested in what Bamberger and the gallery had to offer. They started bringing in their own photos so that Bamberger could help edit and print them. The gallery became a gathering place for community meetings and parties. "The entire community embraced Bill, his team, and the gallery," Sullivan says. What was supposed to be a short stay extended to six months. The city of San Antonio considered buying the gallery. "It went beyond everyone's expectations, and no one wanted to see it go," Sullivan says. When Bamberger and his team returned home, Sullivan began to document what "This House Is Home" had accomplished. She used portraits Bamberger had taken in Santa Cruz, along with the everyday snapshots Bamberger and his team took to document the experience, and combined them with audio from her interviews with people involved in the project. "I've tried to develop a narrative that helps explain and illustrate the gallery from the creators' points-of-view," Sullivan says. "I'm a proponent of traditional English studies, but at the same time, I like the fact that multimedia projects like this are more accessible to a larger audience." Sullivan showed "This House Is Home" at the Fourth Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium held in April by the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR). "Carolina's undergraduate research program allows students to engage in original research and creative activity with mentors who are top scholars and teachers across the University," says Patricia Pukkila, OUR's director. "The students we sponsor present their findings at professional conferences and discover that their research really is the `real thing,' and they also help to convey the exciting opportunities available to Carolina undergraduates to a national audience." Taylor, who teaches composition with an emphasis on using new media such as video, audio, and the like, says, "Asking students to conduct original research for real audiences, not just for their classmates or teachers, has been enormously successful in my classes. My students have been universally positive about research-based teaching and learning." Sullivan just got an OUR grant to go to the 2004 Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Antonio. "It's been an excellent experience for me," she says. "Some people consider art something that enhances life, something at the trimmings. But this project seemed to be more central to people. It really vitalized the community and made people come together." |