A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks explores the power of images in advancing racial, economic, and social equality as seen through the lens of Gordon Parks, one of America’s most trailblazing artists, and the generation of young photographers, filmmakers, and activists he inspired.
Directed by John Maggio; Produced by Monica Berra, Richard Lowe, George Kunhardt, Teddy Kunhardt, Matthew Henderson; Executive Produced by Alicia Keys, Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, Jelani Cobb, Jacqueline Glover, Peter Kunhardt, Sr., Peter Kunhardt, Jr.
A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks explores the enduring legacy of photographer, writer, composer, activist, and filmmaker Gordon Parks, and spotlights his visionary work and its impact on artists working today. Gordon’s legacy comes to life through three contemporary photographers: Devin Allen, whose photograph Baltimore Uprising of the 2015 Freddie Gray protests was featured on the cover of Time magazine; LaToya Ruby Frazier who for five years documented the Flint, Michigan water crisis and in 2020 photographed Breonna Taylor’s family for Vanity Fair; and Jamel Shabazz, whose New York City photographs of individuals and groups form a visual history of cultural shifts and struggles across the city. The film celebrates the power of images in advancing racial, economic, and social equality as seen through the lens of Gordon Parks, one of America’s most trailblazing artists, and the generation of young photographers, filmmakers, and activists he inspired.
“There’s another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone else will take it further on, you know.” — Gordon Parks
The Kunhardt Film Foundation has created free Educator Resources to accompany the film, including lesson plans and interview archives and photo archive to accompany the film. A discussion guide and six lessons supports creative and dynamic conversation about Gordon Parks and the ways his trailblazing work continues to inspire photographers and filmmakers today. Adult learners, high school and college classrooms, museum programs, and youth art organizations will find dynamic and robust resources.
The Gordon Parks Foundation permanently preserves the work of Gordon Parks, makes it available to the public through exhibitions, books, and electronic media and supports artistic and educational activities that advance what Gordon described as “the common search for a better life and a better world.”
From Juneteenth to the 4th of July, we invite you to participate in the second annual #CivicSeason through self-guided public art visits in San Francisco, as well as in-person and online events that invite civic engagement through the arts. We’re teaming up with hundreds of history museums and sites across the country through @HistoryMadeByUs, in partnership with the next generation shaping our democracy to launch a new tradition that makes room for all of our stories – and write the next chapter together.
On Sunday, December 12th, we were invited by Dr. Wallace J. Nichols to share how we put #bluemind into action with The 11th Annual Blue Mind [Deconstructed] Summit.
Blue Mind. Forever.
Our Blue Marble travels started here eleven years ago in 2010, and I never get tired of the spectacular view from McCovey Cove. However, it was a little strange to see the empty space where the statue of Willie McCovey should be. Stretch has stepped out of the batter’s box, waiting for construction to cease. As we lined up in the rain, a sail boat named City Lights swooped by. Raindrops dripped on our heads, but we eventually made our way inside for our holiday treat – hot cocoa and cookies with Lou Seal. In our ballpark by the water, in an atmospheric river, on an ordinary Sunday. In 2021.
The article that follows was replicated with a single click, thanks to a nifty tool created by our friends at COMPOST, a magazine about the digital commons. COMPOST is published to the web and DWeb using the Distributed Press API.
Margaret Warren and I greatly enjoyed our time working together to tell our story of “A Confluence of Waters” with The Blue Marbles Project for Issue 02 of COMPOST magazine, which you can find HERE, along with a specially curated Spotify playlist. (Begin with Blue Mind, and follow the Del Sol Quartet to Fast Blue Village 2). Happy Reading!
A Confluence of Waters
Exploring Connections with The Blue Marbles Project
Andi Wong and Margaret Warren
In the Summer of 2019, we—Andi Wong and Margaret Warren—met for the first time at one of the Friday lunches at the Internet Archive headquarters on Funston Street in San Francisco. We met while planning art activities for the Decentralized Web Camp, and it was there that Andi first shared a blue marble with Margaret. But that is not where this story begins, and it’s certainly not where it will end.
This story is non-linear and organically expanding. Like mushrooms in a Fairy Circle. Like when websites used to have web rings. Like BuckyBalls: nano particles of carbon atoms in a spherical structure. Like the new vision of the web: decentralized and linked through nodes and edges. A synchronistic murmuration of inspirations and enchantment.
The ancient Greeks first declared the sphere the most perfect form and proclaimed it was the shape of the Earth and all the planets. Then on December 7, 1972, the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft made this vision evident when it produced this image of the earth, nicknamed “The Blue Marble,” on December 7, 1972.
Apollo 17: Blue Marble (Dec 7, 1972)
Creator: NASA
Copyright notice: 1972 NASA
Copyright terms: Public Domain Content
Apollo 17: Blue Marble (Dec 7, 1972)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2018 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Blue Marbles Project: Synergy defined by Buckminster Fuller (2014)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2014 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons
Now jump to 2009, when a marine biologist, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, known simply as “J” had an ambitious idea to hand his friend LeBaron Myers a blue marble. That simple act became an idea, which then became a movement. A low-tech-slow-motion global art project with a seemingly staggering goal of passing a blue marble through the hands of every (yes, every) person on OUR blue marble Earth, and along with each passing—a simple message of gratitude and reminder that everything we do on our water planet matters.
Dr. Nichols holding a blue marble
Creator: Neil Ever Osborne
Dr. Nichols is an innovative and entrepreneurial scientist. In 1996, J placed a satellite-tag on an adult female loggerhead sea turtle that was released into the wild after being rescued in Baja, Mexico. Adelita, named after a local fisherman’s daughter, was the first animal tracked across the Pacific Ocean, traveling over 9,000 miles from Baja, Mexico to her place of birth in Sendai, Japan. Thanks to the internet, Adelita’s journey was followed by children everywhere.
Where is your water?
J often asks people the question: ‘Where is your water?’ to kick off a conversation. What is the special place where you find you go to the water’s edge? For some, it might be the neighborhood swimming pool. Others might answer that they go kayaking or sailing, or they think of a tropical island paradise where they go on vacation. Garden hoses, public fountains, an opened fire hydrant, or ocean surf… Really, there is no wrong answer.
Scientists and teachers spend a lot of time crafting thoughtful, open-ended questions when they want more than a simple “yes” or “no” answer.
In 2010, Andi went to hear J talk about sea turtles, after an introductory email exchange about water. She wrote to ask J about his view of the changing waters of the Gulf of Mexico, after seeing his CNN video report about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill online. [1] When J asked Andi this question, she really had to think before answering.
Andi’s Water
My water begins in a small town in the California Delta called Locke, a historic rural Chinese-American community in the United States. The town of Locke was built in 1915 by Chinese residents, after the Chinatown in nearby Walnut Grove was destroyed by fire. I enjoyed lazy childhood summers in Locke, staying with my grandparents in their home on Main Street. My cousins and I had the run of the wooden plank walkways and the back alleys of this tiny four-block town. Locke was a place where we could roam and play until sundown, and we children grew up with very little knowledge of the extreme challenges faced by our families: The Page Act of 1875, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, The Geary Act of 1892, The Alien Law of 1913 which prohibited the Chinese from owning land. There, in this isolated town, my mother’s family made it through the Great Depression and World War II.
In the 1940’s and 50’s, most young people—including my mother—left Locke, searching for greater opportunity and better living conditions. Today, in 2021, few residents of Chinese ancestry remain, and Locke has one of 300 failing systems in California that routinely supply roughly 1 million people with contaminated drinking water.
The Blue Marbles Project: Locke Chinese School (2015)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2015 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
The Blue Marbles Project: Connie King’s Toilet Garden, Locke, CA (2015)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2015 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
The river flows past my hometown of Sacramento, where I went to school, worked and got married, before moving to San Francisco. There the Bay waters swirl around Angel Island, where my grandmother, five months pregnant, landed on September 13, 1929, accompanied by my grandfather after a 31-day ocean crossing on the Tenyo Maru. Ye Ye, my grandfather, was free to depart, having taken up residency in California in 1911, as the son of a merchant, but Yin Yin, my grandmother, was held on the island for processing. The Angel Island Immigration Station transcripts document hours of intense interrogation. These records also revealed that Ye Ye was manager at United Meat Market for 36 firm members, and perhaps the cooperative’s pooling of investments explains how he was able to post the $1000 bail for Yin Yin’s temporary release eight days later. As ordered by the court, my grandmother returned to Angel Island carrying proof of childbirth: her 3-month old son Edmund—my father—and she was officially admitted to the United States as the wife of a domiciled Chinese merchant on March 17, 1930.
The Blue Marbles Project: Angel Island (2012)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2012 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Angel Island Suitcase: Clay Marbles (2011)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2011 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
My water continues beyond Angel Island, flowing past the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco, where my two now-grown children built sandcastles on Ocean Beach and learned “you never turn your back on the Ocean.” It is a long oceanic journey from the farmlands of the Pearl River Delta of Southern Guangdong Province to reach “Gum Saan,” meaning “Gold Mountain,” what the Chinese called San Francisco, California. Much like Adelita the sea turtle, my immigrant ancestors needed both fortitude and good fortune to cross the Pacific Ocean.
For the past twenty years, I’ve worked in San Francisco public schools, as a teaching artist—a phrase coined to describe “an active artist who chooses to also develop the skills of teaching in order to activate a variety of learning experiences that are catalyzed by artistic engagement.” When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered both schools and theaters, I focused on supporting two groups that struggled to adapt to the pandemic, often with limited access and experiences with technology: artists and elders.
Now I’m serving as project manager, researcher/archivist, and community liaison for a project called “Angel Island Insight,” with the Del Sol String Quartet and The Last Hoisan Poets. My work with poets Genny Lim, Flo Oy Wong, and Nellie Wong, also descendents of Angel Island immigrants, has filled me with a richer understanding and gratitude for the survival instinct and wisdom exhibited by the Chinese American diaspora. These vibrant elders taught me “haw meong suey,” an expression that literally means “Good Life’s Water” in Hoisan-wa, the dialect spoken by early Chinese immigrants. [2] By writing new poems in Hoisan-wa, they are keeping the history and language of our ancestors alive and vibrant, in a time when intercultural understanding and cooperation are needed more than ever. Del Sol, unable to perform for audiences in concert venues, struggled with latency issues while streaming on Zoom. They pivoted to playing free outdoor pop-up concerts and commissioning composers to write new short musical works to inspire joy.
The history of the Chinese on Angel Island, America’s own immigration history, remains unknown to many. But when audiences board the ferry to Angel Island for performances by Del Sol in October, this artistic exploration of the history of immigration and exclusion will be presented with “haw meong suey,” a healing dose of ocean. For me, this was yet another surprising chapter in an epic voyage that began with the gift of a blue marble from Dr. Wallace J. Nichols at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts on July 29, 2010.
At that event, four large water coolers were lined up on a table, each filled with a colorful flotsam of plastic demonstrating the increasing levels of plastic pollution accumulating in our oceans from 1910, 1960, 2010, to 2030—an ominous depiction of the future, if no interventions were taken. Neat rows of stacked glass tumblers issued a silent dare to drink. Plastic Century was an experiential art installation created for World Oceans Day and the 100th anniversary of Jacques Cousteau’s birth. J and his project’s co-creators wished to convey the “feeling of strangeness, discovery, disgust, and delight… what we want to remain with people as they walk out into the great big plastic world.”
The Blue Marbles Project: Wallace J. Nichols (2010)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2010 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Open House: Plastic Century (2010)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2010 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
J was there to speak about his first-hand impressions of the Deep Water Horizon disaster, the largest marine oil spill in history. He had just returned from New Orleans after filming apocalyptic scenes of the ocean on fire from a helicopter. In Louisiana, he had walked on beaches littered with tar balls; filming and describing the details to his daughters. When I came across his report on CNN, I was sickened by his images of waters roiling in an oily sheen of sickly hues of yellows, reds, and white. “The Gulf,” he said, had become “the world’s largest petri dish.” with the unprecedented use of the chemical dispersant, COREXIT.
Noting that scientists are not often known for speaking about love, J spoke openly of his love for the ocean and his commitment to care for a world that his two daughters would grow to inherit. He discussed the value of using new tools and technologies to reach hearts and minds. Then, at the end of the evening, J gave each person in the room one blue marble. He explained the simple rules of the “blue game,” a ritual that has since become an integral part of my story, connecting me to thousands of others since that Summer in 2010.
Around the World with the Blue Marbles
I had just taken a new position at school: working in the computer lab. Excited to find ways that the arts might be integrated with technology, I soon discovered that all the kids really wanted to do in the lab was play a computer game called Marble Blast, where players roll a small marble through a variety of obstacles courses, without falling “Out of Bounds.” If you made it to the end, you were rewarded with a big burst of fireworks.
Image via Andi Wong
When I asked the kids why they liked playing the game, I learned that they knew that if they kept playing the game, they would improve. And one boy told me that he liked this game because he knew he could never die in it.
It was then that I decided what I would do with my class. We would play Marble Blast, away from the keyboard, in real-life.
When very young children draw their blue marbles close to their eyes while looking into the light, they will tell you that they see a whole menagerie of creatures, both real and imaginary — dolphins and whales, sea turtles and fish, merpeople and pirate ships. The children are eager to share what they see, and their eyes shine bright with wonder.
The Blue Marbles Project: The Glass Menagerie (2013)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2013 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
When I asked the children if it might be possible to pass a blue marble through the hands of everyone on Earth, they answered enthusiastically, “Yes!” The follow up question, “Can you do it by yourself?” made it clear that we would need to ask others for help.
At first, we only had one blue marble to play with. I asked the class, if they could send the Blue Marble anywhere on Earth, where would they like to see the marble go? After much discussion, the children decided that they wanted to see the Blue Marble at The World Series. We had to figure out a way. Incredibly, within minutes, we discovered Mr. Rogers, a fourth grade teacher, would help.
The Blue Marbles Project: Mapping (2011)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2011 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
The next stop was Cuba, a place that was near impossible for most children to visit. The children’s imaginations caught fire. We bought a case of marbles and the game was on. Together, we traveled with Blue Marble to see the world beyond the United States. The Colosseum in Rome. The Berlin Wall. The Eiffel Tower. The Taj Mahal. The Great Wall of China! Family and friends helped the children to see the world by sharing their adventures through photographs and correspondence on Facebook.
It took three years, but the children finally achieved their goal to visit every continent on Earth, when a Blue Marble made it to Antarctica. Blue Marble followed the water, traveled across the Sahara Desert by camel, crossed the Alaskan frontier on the Iditarod, via gondola, rickshaw, airplane, and submarine.
Gif via Andi Wong
As the children learned about the Ocean and her importance to all life on Earth, they grew eager to apply their knowledge. They learned how to reduce, reuse, recycle, and ultimately refuse the plastic that soils their beaches by sewing their own cloth lunch bags. We sponsored a nest in the Yucatan Peninsula and celebrated the birth of sea turtle hatchlings. The third graders premiered Chelonia’s Story, an original opera about a young sea turtle and an ocean scientist who gently sings that captive turtles should be returned to the sea. On International Biodiversity Day 2016, the children used a new technology called Zoom, which was still relatively unknown then, to broadcast their sustainability fair celebration to a classmate in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
The Blue Marbles Project: Vivazul Sea Turtles (2012)
Creator: Enriqueta Ramirez
Three newly hatched sea turtles swim in glistening water in an orange tub.
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2012 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
The project provided an opportunity for adults and children to learn together through play. When we made new connections between people and places, our planet felt a little smaller and nicer. There was a marble for everyone, so there was no worry about being left out. If a child lost a marble, we would ask what they might do differently and give them another to practice with. We all need to practice taking better care of our one Blue Marble. We are all in this together.
The Blue Marbles Project: One Cubic Foot (2012)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2012 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
The Ocean Mural (2018)
Creator: Andi Wong
Copyright notice: 2018 Andi Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
As time passed, the photo album of Blue Marble images grew, but with each school year, we also became more and more aware of the accelerating speed of environmental change. Would our photos eventually become a record of places transformed beyond recognition? Would the stories and information attached to the images be useful in the future? Social media platforms were being used to manipulate public opinion and spread disinformation, and I was looking for another way to work with my images. That’s when I met Margaret.
As if we were guided by two rivers headed towards a confluence, we met in 2019 when I was invited to support artistic projects at the first DWeb Camp at the Mushroom Farm.
This is when I first learned of Margaret and her project: ImageSnippets. It was then that I asked her the question: “Where is YOUR water?”
The Blue Marbles Project: Andi Wong (2014)
Creator: Young Wong
Copyright notice: 2014 Young Wong
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Margaret in Indiatlantic
Creator: Margaret Warren
Copyright notice: Margaret Warren
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Margaret’s Water
When I was a very little girl, my father would play marbles with me, but not in the traditional way with shooters and circles. Instead, we would take a big thick quilt, spread it out in a haphazard way and give it hills and valleys. Then we would take the marbles and move them around the quilted landscape. Maybe to my dad they were like little ‘troops,’ but I wanted to organize and study them. I grouped them by colors and types; categorized and counted. Later on, when our family would go flea market shopping, I so loved the marbles, it gave me my own little thing to seek out and collect while my parents collected cameras or other gadgets they were passionate about.
Blue Marbles on a Quilt
Creator: Margaret Warren
Copyright notice: Margaret Warren
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Marbles
Creator: Margaret Warren
Copyright notice: Margaret Warren (2020)
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Over the years, I have created many projects and professions, but most often I say I am an artist, a creator, a researcher, and a technologist—even though I feel like these labels keep overlapping and meandering. Looking back, I can now see I’ve spent most of my life responding to an inner curiosity for things like making art and photographs, describing images, discovering synchronicities, and building networks of people and machinery. Rolling and tumbling from one eddy to another, my life itself has felt both fluid and yet also deliberately and persistently guided by a much deeper current.
My water begins in the very far western tip of Kentucky, where I was born within ten miles of the Mississippi River. I was born in the county seat in a little town called Clinton, not far from an even smaller town called Columbus, which sits on a bluff overlooking the river. In the 1800’s, Columbus was much larger; a busy port for trains, barges, steamboats and all kind of river traffic on North-South trade routes. From Chicago, Illinois to Mobile, Alabama to New Orleans, Louisiana, ferries moved travelers across the nearly mile-wide Mississippi as they journeyed westward seeking fame, fortune, and new opportunities.
Some of my ancestors started out to be some of those westward seekers, but they just didn’t make it past the river. In fact, one story told in my family is that they decided to settle in Kentucky because one of my great-great-great grandmothers had taken one look at the river and said, “I’m not crossing that! [3]
…and yet it moves..
Creator: Margaret Warren
Copyright notice: Margaret Warren (2017)
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
As a young child, my story continued south to the Gulf of Mexico when my parents moved to Northwest Florida, to an area called the Big Bend.
The waters of this part of Florida are quite special. This area is home to both the largest diveable underwater cave formation in the world (Wakulla Springs) and also to one of the oldest National wildlife refuges in the United States. Established in 1931, the coastal area of St. Mark’s was founded as a protection for migratory birds. The wetlands and estuaries of this area are also referred to as the ‘Forgotten Coast’ or ‘the Other Florida,’ because this area is so different from the white sandy beaches, palm trees, and condos that most people think of when they think of the state. The refuge protects longleaf pine savannas and coastal marshes as far as the eye can see. Made up of salt waters from the gulf and freshwater from nearby springs and rivers, this ecoregion is known as the southern coastal plain and is home to an amazing array of flora and fauna.
St. Marks
Creator: Margaret Warren
Copyright notice: Margaret Warren (2014-2021)
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Unlike the fishermen and other inhabitants of these coastal towns, my parents were young artists interested in astronomy, nature, and wildlife. We regularly went canoeing and hiking in the area. Through my father’s work as a photojournalist, we circulated around the coast learning about the people and the environment. My father would often pull me out of school to bring me along on his feature photography days to take photos of places like St. Mark’s for the Tallahassee Democrat, the local newspaper.
As a teenager, my waters moved me in a new way, into a tour of duty in the US Coast Guard.
When I was part of the Coast Guard, I always felt so proud to be part of a mission for search and rescue, tending to buoys, and coordinating environmental cleanup in all of the waters of the US. Though I served only one term in the Coast Guard as a Cryptographic Electronics Technician, I did travel to the Great Lakes, the New York City Harbor, the SF Bay Area in California, Kodiak, Alaska, and then back again to the Mississippi River in New Orleans.
Electronics study in the Coast Guard led to computer science in college, and then various jobs that circulated around photography, technology, music and the arts and from the Gulf Coast to California and back again multiple times. Following my curiosity over the years, I was inspired to explore a unique problem: how to describe images with more formalized, machine-readable techniques.
Being raised by artists, naturalists and photographers had undoubtedly inspired me; but I had also been the seven year old making encyclopedias of bird pictures matched to their scientific names. I made all of my school writing projects about images. When I would print my own photographs in the darkroom with my father, I always made sure I had written all of the ‘metadata’ (the who, what, why, where, how, when) on the back of the print:
Creator: Margaret Warren
Copyright notice: Margaret Warren (2020)
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
A Pair
Creator: Margaret Warren
Copyright notice: Margaret Warren (2020)
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
As my technology career evolved with the web, I strived to find the best ways to publish my images online with their metadata. But to my dismay, the web was actually evolving in such a way as to de-value publishing and curation methods that would have handled image metadata more appropriately.
In fact, to this day, many content producers continue to exercise poor metadata habits with images, and these habits—whether learned or ignored—have actually led to much more severe problems as a result. The serious problems associated with misinformation and disinformation on the web are now widely recognized and widespread. In particular, images stripped of their original metadata have been re-contextualized to manipulate emotion and used to polarize viewpoints.
Yet it can be challenging to write metadata. Many people just don’t want to write it, as they often don’t want to take the time to add context and intention to images, and don’t think about what will happen to the metadata once an image gets on the web. The technology behind centralized social media photo sharing has deliberately made it difficult to keep metadata attached to images, while at the same time retaining your image collections to keep you further tied to a platform.
We are still a very long way from mastering what it would mean to be able to formally record the context around the making of an image, as well as the intention with which that image is being shared. Though computer vision can produce some interesting demonstrations of image classification, language is very ambiguous and subjective, and artificial intelligence is a long way off from capturing the subtleties of image metadata.
In general, it can be said that sharing images properly on the web requires a human-centered thoughtfulness—a theory not embraced by advertising revenues.
ImageSnippets
Thus I started building ImageSnippets. ImageSnippets is a web based system that has now been in development for over 11 years with ideas stretching back almost 20.
I call ImageSnippets a metadata management system, but it’s designed to be so much more. It can be used to curate image collections, and be an interface for images to be linked in interoperable ways to other data on the web using linked data. It’s also being used as part of research projects for modeling formalized image descriptions, with descriptions by subject matter experts. All of this can be done in such a way that the descriptions can be machine-readable, and thus assembled into image-based knowledge graphs—also known as image graphs—in the process. In this way, ImageSnippets is also a research tool for knowledge representation.
Instead of requiring images to be held in centralized data stores, the tool is designed to sit as a layer over the images. That means the data can be held anywhere on any server, and the data is openly available and queryable using the SPARQL query language.
At the 2019 DWeb Camp, I worked as a volunteer to build out the local mesh network, as well as to design a collaborative art project. When I met Andi through this work and showed ImageSnippets to her, she immediately embraced the vision of ImageSnippets. Extending the idea of network nodes to the blue marbles, we both excitedly saw how it could be used to connect the stories of the photographs collected between all those people she and her students gifted with blue marbles.
The Blue Marble Game goes to ImageSnippets
Creator: Margaret Warren
Copyright notice: Margaret Warren (2019)
Copyright terms: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Publishing these images here on COMPOST with Distributed Press, we are fortunate to see this experiment come alive. But we are just at the beginning of this next phase of our story. This article represents a next step in taking image and metadata publishing techniques to decentralized protocols.
Computer scientist Admiral Grace Hopper said, “If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you’ve just proven a natural law!” When a blue marble is passed it is a gift of gratitude for the good work that you do. When we share our gratitude in this way, we are building understanding, empathy, and love in our interconnected world. The blue marble opens up pathways through which we can learn and understand one another through a shared connection with our waters.
Image via Andi Wong and Margaret Warren
The images in this piece flip to reveal their metadata and the images themselves also contain the embedded metadata. This functionality is provided by ImageSnippets, a project by Margaret Warren. Image metadata allows others to understand the context and provenance of images when they are shared and published.
The authors wish to thank COMPOST for helping us to find confluence through our parallel exploration of the wild, domestic, and virtual waters that have shaped us as individuals. Andi & Margaret will continue to reveal, preserve, and share digital stories with The Blue Marbles Project, joining The Blue Mind Network’s global efforts to put #bluemind science into action to create common knowledge and practice.
If you would like to join their project, please visit bluemarble.pics to float a note to Andi at ArtsEd4All and dive into metadata with Margaret at ImageSnippets.
Summer vacation provided an interesting opportunity to explore virtual learning with students at Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. When the 2019-2020 school ended, students entering the fifth grade were presented with an open invitation to participate in a free summer music workshop with the Del Sol String Quartet. Our stated goal: To work with workshop participants to create a book and recording of an original musical composition for The Del Sol String Quartet & Huang Ruo’s “Your Wall is Our Canvas: The Angel Island Project.”
With a more relaxed summer schedule, the pre-workshop assignments and on-line music workshop were designed to give students a self-driven, hands-on arts exploration over the course of a month. Students were presented with two assignments, in advance of a July 13th online Zoom workshop with the members of Del Sol. The online workshop aimed to create a low-stress experience where the participating students would have fun socially connecting with their peers through musical play.
A Change of Perspective with Digital Photography
The first summer assignment explored digital photography, through a series of prompts, inspired by nine collaborative poems written by the 4th grade class. Using a camera can help to open up new ways of appreciating and enjoying familiar physical surrounds, and the students had been sheltering in place at home since March 13. After confirming that each student had access to a cell phone that would enable them to take digital photos, the workshop participants were presented with nine exercises that would encourage students to explore their everyday surroundings. When we gathered online, it was a fun treat to enjoy seeing each of the individual responses to the same prompt and appreciate the personal way that each photographer addressed the assignment.
A Sonic Scavenger Hunt
The second assignment was inspired by Del Sol musical collaborator, composer Danny Clay, who enjoys creating playful games that help people to create music together. His Sonic Scavenger Hunt calls for students to look for objects at home based on a list of ten sounds types.
An eclectic collection of sounds, gathered at home by Leah:
Students brought their discoveries to the workshop, and together the group explored how their mini-orchestras could be put together into a musical composition. Students were also invited to record three sounds that describe “home,” found either inside their homes or outside. Sound of Home is the resulting collection, preserved for the future on the Internet Archive.
In addition to the sounds gathered at home by 4th graders, another collection, Sound of Home: San Franciscowas recorded from a variety of San Francisco locations,and both collections shared in celebration of World Listening Day 2020. Since 2010, every July 18th, thousands of people all over the world have participated in World Listening Day by sharing soundscapes, in remembrance of renowned Canadian composer, music educator, and author, R. Murray Schafer. His World Soundscape Project developed the fundamental ideas and practices of acoustic ecology in the 1970s.
Teaching artist Andi Wong’s first visit to Angel Island was in 1989, when she and her husband brought her father-in-law Billy back to the island, for the very first time since he was admitted to the United States in February of 1931. Touring the barracks, Billy shared painful childhood memories of being held on the island for 18 days, not knowing when he would be allowed to leave. He sadly recalled how lonely and isolated he felt, especially when evening fell, and the sounds of music and people laughing drifted across the Bay.
The familiar soothing sounds of ocean waves lapping at the shore opens the collaborative musical composition featuring our youth orchestra of found sound. A new poem shared by artist/poet Flo Oy Wong, spoken in the Hoisan-wa dialect of the Angel Island immigrant poets, transitions to the sounds of the Del Sol String Quartet, playing a musical selection from composer Huang Ruo.
九 9 Poems for “Your Wall is Our Canvas: The Angel Island Project”
“九 9 poems for Your Wall is Our Canvas: The Angel Island Project,” an online book of the poetry and artwork created by the soon-to-be 5th graders at Dianne Feinstein Elementary, builds upon existing school programming. 2020 marked the tenth anniversary of Author’s Day at DFES, a highly anticipated school event which brings children’s book authors and illustrators to read to children in every classroom. Sadly, this event was cancelled, along with most of the arts events planned for Spring, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Working to help the students to create their own book was a nice way to acknowledge this special school tradition. By archiving the book of student poems, photographs and essays on the Internet Archive for open access and download, this project also offers an example of how bookmaking might be explored by classes in the future. In addition to the students, staff key to the history of the school, the librarian Carol Fuerth and the art teacher Sharon Collins, were also engaged in the project, and the history of their contributions acknowledged, recorded and preserved for the future.
Reflections on Learning: 2019-2020
The Del Sol String Quartet’s partnership with Dianne Feinstein Elementary School is as an example of an integrated, expansive artistic collaboration that is possible with community engagement. In a time that calls for both collective imagination and coordinated action, there is great benefit in giving young people the opportunity to learn alongside artists, who model both discipline and adaptability in art and life.
The artistic project also serves as a record of an unusual time, when so much of what was considered to be “normal” changed. There will certainly be challenges ahead in these most uncertain of times, but as students, teachers and families prepare to begin a new school year, we take a moment of reflection to appreciate the lessons that we learned in 2020.
“Since we can’t go to school, I really miss it. I miss DFES, my friends, my teachers, and everything from DFES. I grew up there and can’t believe I used to be in Kindergarten. DFES is important to me because of everything I have learned there.”
In the course of developing this project with the school community, personal connections were made, internal resources discovered, and bridges were built across generations, between school and home. This arts project encouraged and amplified the diverse voices of a school’s community, while recording and preserving community history. Children were presented with a multitude of ways to reflect upon their own personal identities and consider the importance of their family, school and culture, as they created their own works of art. Del Sol String Quartet’s Angel Island Project at Dianne Feinstein Elementary School presented an opportunity to see Art as the Ocean, not just as the Island.
And the learning continues…
“Your Wall is Our Canvas: the Angel Island Project,” composed by Huang Ruo and performed by the Del Sol String Quartet with the contemporary chamber choir, Volti, will weave a story of immigration and discrimination of then and now. https://www.delsolquartet.com/angelisland
This project is supported in part by the Hewlett Foundations 50 Arts Commissions, the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation. Del Sol String Quartet’s partnership with Dianne Feinstein ES, was made possible thanks to an Artists and Communities Partnership – Creative Youth Arts (ACIP-CY) grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.
“When I was orbiting Earth in the space shuttle, I could float over to a window and gaze down at the delicate white clouds, brilliant orange deserts, and sparkling blue water of the planet below. I could see the coral reefs in the oceans, fertile farmlands in the valleys, and twinkling city lights beneath the clouds. Even from space, it is obvious that Earth is a living planet.” — Dr. Sally Ride
Sally Ride EarthKAM is a NASA educational outreach program that enables students, teachers, and the public to learn about Earth from the unique perspective of space. The project was initiated by Dr. Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space. The EarthKAM camera was first operated on the International Space Station (ISS) on Expedition 1 in 2001. Sally Ride died in 2012, and in 2013, NASA renamed the program Sally Ride EarthKAM. The Sally Ride EarthKAM camera remains a permanent payload on the ISS, supporting about four missions annually. EarthKAM’s Mission 50 took place between November 10-13, and students around the world were able to request images of specific locations on Earth.
NASA has a familiar adage: Follow The Water, for where there is water, there is life. For Mission 50, Rooftop School’s fourth graders made a list of the places where they would like to see water.
As Sally Ride noted, “The view of Earth is spectacular.”
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From November 30 to December 11, 2015 COP21, also known as the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, will brings the world together with hopes of achieving a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C.
The Association of Space Explorers reached out to their fellow astronauts to pass on a simple message of solidarity, hope and collaboration to combat climate change and reach our political leaders during such a crucial time.
ArtsEd4All 