YEOJUNG

In preparing for the festival, I tried to use only materials that were easily accessible to children. The children I met during the project didn’t feel confident in their artistic abilities. They believed that they had to put in a lot of practice and that their parents disapproved of their artistic pursuits. They are right. At some point, they will need to have the technical proficiency to implement their ideas, even if it means spending a lot of time on it. This is also not just about making stunning artwork. It’s a way to expand their world and a tool to communicate with their audience in a kind way. But those are not yet the priorities of future creatives.

Balloons were used to create space. Creating the structure and using the balloons reminded me that working with children is different from creating and hanging stunning posters. The balloons I saw the following day had shrunk a bit, and some had completely deflated, so I had to keep inflating them and reinforcing them. I thought I would have to do it all over again in the mornings for the Festival. This made me reflect on the continuous care children require, their vulnerability, and the need for someone to keep them in shape, and I started to contemplate deeply about what I could do to help.

Hopefully, I’ll know before the festival is over because it’s time to start executing rather than pondering. Because this reflection is for taking action, and unrealised imagination tends to become delusion.

Dear WE, 

In the current digital media culture, children’s childhoods need to be reshaped again, enabling them to develop their own creative paths. This involves supporting their growth as creators who are not swept away by mainstream culture but instead distinguish and expand their imaginations with their unique views.

We need professionals working for children in the creative and cultural industries. They need to help children know their rights, have opportunities to use them in practice, and be supported by them. This takes many forms for children, from allowing them to use their imagination freely in a safe environment to ensure that their rights are reflected in their interactions within the world and the support they receive to ensuring that they are protected when they encounter barriers to access. The approach of children creating their own visual culture is about turning their imaginations into reality.

Children who receive support as future creatives may feel empowered when they believe decisions are made about them. It was clear in our conversations with children – they want to be creators. They have unrestricted imaginations but don’t know how to realise them, so they try to find their way in the media they experience. Let children live their childhood through their imaginations, not digital devices.

Understanding children can be challenging. However, if we embrace a little inconvenience, we can see what’s in them. If we reach out, even if it’s difficult to see and understand them, we can make a better society for them and a better world for all of us.

From YeoJung MAAI CSM, UAL

In this age of extreme personalisation, discussing togetherness may seem outdated to some, akin to a Y2K sensibility. Research shows that children today are growing up in an environment vastly different from that of their parents, reshaping their childhoods with influences like social media and smartphone addiction. While technology is often seen as a double-edged sword, it is not the villain here. These challenges have always existed and may be part of a larger, incomprehensible purpose. Maintaining personal well-being without losing individuality is crucial amid these changes. Our altered digital habits serve as models for children, and we discuss issues like loneliness, isolation, and depression within unseen barriers. We are still social animals, as evolutionists suggest, and our brains need time to adapt to this new era and possibly transition to a new species. Understanding who we are and living a life true to ourselves require societal support. We are their environment and mitigation.

Even if this is an ongoing matter, there comes a time when one must conclude. During a period of exploration, I met a middle-aged woman who inspired me to research how to support and empower children to become creative beings in the digital age. The ultimate goal was the happiness of childhood.

“Happiness? It sounds like chasing after clouds. There is no need for philosophical approaches. The past remains a mere memory. Why must children specifically be happy? What is liminality? Is it included just because it looks cool? I completely fail to understand this sensation of being stuck in the middle. And what about media? I don’t have a smartphone addiction; I manage everything well and live a good life. The correlation between adolescent suicide rates and social media is a mere coincidence. Data interpretation can easily vary. Children are not something you can control. Just focus on raising your own kid.”

Listening to all this feedback, I stopped trying to convince them and focused on my thoughts. Some people lack interest in children. I’ve even met those who argue that our earth needs more care than children. Sometimes, I think I should have pursued my greatest interest: research on interactive, immersive media art. Integrating it with the facade and digital arts would have been cool and profitable—a perfect project for art school. I understand the importance of children for those who have them, but we also know the difficulties of being unable to control things as we wish, and sometimes we want to ignore this burden.

Expanding educational opportunities in the arts for children, especially through established and reputable institutions, could provide immense benefits. While digital tools like iPads offer cost-effective and versatile means for creative expression, the focus should also be on nurturing imagination and exposing children to a variety of artistic mediums. This holistic approach in arts education is essential to ensure children develop a broad spectrum of creative skills and thinking, which will be invaluable as they progress into more advanced, digital forms of art. The challenge lies in balancing financial viability with the need to invest in the creative development of future generations.

Put Your Digital Aside, Let’s Come Together Closer.

Modifying the intervention (second experiment of Phase 1) was to alleviate the participant discomfort observed in the initial experiment. Unfortunately, this only worked as a short-term solution; this made me unable to explore the problems of excessive media exposure further. This highlights the enormous challenge of an individual effort.

This uncomfortable sensation led me to experiment with a collaborative approach, creating a space where participants could bond. Implementing a shared ‘visualisation’ session aimed to promote connections, particularly among family members, without relying on digital media. This supports our desire for togetherness, contrasting with the isolation of our digital habits.

I invited some companies, especially those whose internal policies require them to be in contact with the company at all times, like IT development and production companies. To do the experiment ‘Dreaming Together: Togetherness.’ I requested a message of just three lines and three minutes of their time in the workplace.

We desire to connect.

Let’s set aside digital, come together, and discover.

The only things needed to envision our dreams are each other.

This initiative is designed to transform the environment and reshape childhood experiences, aiming to change digital habits. However, I believe it’s essential for parents to first experience and understand its value before introducing it to their children. Therefore, I initially implemented it in second place (Bhabha, H. K., 2012), ensuring parents fully grasp its importance and effectiveness.

The main idea is that it’s not important to have a medium for connection. This emphasises the value of direct, unmediated human connections over-relying on the media as an intermediary. My objective is to demonstrate an experiment to recover the shift in human narratives that began when media became the medium. This suggests a focus on exploring how human interactions and storytelling have evolved due to the influence of media and an effort to return to more direct, personal forms of communication and connection.

Perhaps we are making children feel lonely, not digital or technological devices. By not learning how to handle these emotions at home, children might be living life clinging to an addictive “pacifier”.

A scene from memory comes to mind: a cute baby’s hand, holding a smartphone handle designed ergonomically for an infant, moves swiftly with dilated pupils along with the movement of the blue pacifier. I can’t blame that tired mother. She needed an escape, too, and the smartphone was just within reach. She also needs a deep rest, reassurance, and recovery.

Our environment and digital device usage habits have created new barriers for us. While this may feel like a protective shield to some, many people express struggles with loneliness and a sense of suffocation.

This small-scale intervention is a step towards breaking down these invisible barriers, fostering unity, and creating a peaceful space reflecting our intrinsic need for connection in a digitally dominated era. Findings showed a sense of burden in overcoming the awkwardness, but this experience leads to relaxation. Khalil Gibran might have prophesied across an era.

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.” from Khalil Gibran’s “The Prophet”

References:

Akesson, B., Burns, V., & Hordyk, S. R. (2017). The place of place in social work: Rethinking the person-in-environment model in social work education and practice. Journal of Social Work Education, 53(3), 372-383.

Bhabha, H. K. (2012). The location of culture. routledge.

Gibran, K. (1973). The Prophet (Illustrated ed.). Knopf Publishing Group

Even though empowering and supporting preteens to become active creators in the digital age is a significant and contemporary issue, there are always doubts and deep pessimism. My primary audience, parents and children, is a great starting point for change, but we feel ambiguous about the whole thing. We also feel lost in the fast-paced world. Literally, we are in a state of uncertainty. We are not sure about our concerns, perspectives, or ability to influence and support our kids.

I was just wondering what we could do other than let kids follow the paths of many and point them in the direction we knew was better.

The first workshop was a closed experiment with friends that I already knew and were aware of what I was trying to achieve, and the second time, I opened it up to the public with the library’s help, but only five children attended.  This made me even more aware of my lack of experience with children, so I need to be more qualified, or I may need to outsource the education work to a more qualified person to stay passive in my observations. If I want to be a supporter of children’s visual culture.

The mums who came to help with my workshops explained that I needed to understand the excessive and crazy 11plus in London, particularly in the SW area. They said that children have two years from the age of nine to prepare for secondary school, which takes a lot of time, effort, and money. She consoled me by saying that it’s a time when children are applying and taking exams, so it’s no wonder there are so few children to attend the workshops. She said that even birthday parties are postponed during this time.

She also said that even children interested in art pause during this time because the school gives points for instrumental skills, but art is not a consideration. She mentioned that she was worried about not being able to meet up with friends because of the lack of time and that playing games and watching YouTube during that time would only take up time, but she said that it was not something she could change by herself.

I said that children need to build their own worlds before they are exposed to mass culture to have the courage to choose a different path from others and to maintain an outsider’s perspective. One mum said she is a math teacher, and her daughter is good at drawing and wants to be an artist. She is good at academics, but she doesn’t know how to help her. She asked me if she could be an artist when she grew up, and I told her that an artist is not someone who creates artwork or products but someone who sees the world from a different perspective and that even mathematicians do their own art, and I was relieved that she found some comfort in that.

Thankfully, the library put it on social media to help with my workshop.

The doctor I interviewed last month has generously offered to consult on the “Experiment for Children” for the next six months. He said that he felt that he had given too general answers in the last interview, and since then, he has given more thought to the impact of media on children’s mental health. Here’s a translated version of part of the last interview.

Interview with Dr Young Jin Kim, a specialist in adolescent depression and addictive behaviour

1. Your personal opinions and views on the current media landscape as a psychiatrist.
   The current media environment is so complex and diverse that we are bombarded with media. As a medium for conveying information, the media has become so diverse and complex.
   This is likely due to the democratisation of digital media. Digital democratisation has made it easier for us to get information through easily accessible media.
   This seems to have been brought closer to us by COVID-19, which has made it easier for us to think deeply, with the advantage of gaining a wider range of knowledge at our convenience.
   It seems that the ability to think deeply, think creatively, and remember things is becoming less and less important.
   This trade-off is likely to intensify in the future.
2. What is the ideal media environment for children (9–12 years old)?
   It is difficult for children under the age of 13 to establish the right values. Currently, media is accessible to everyone during digital media popularisation.
   It can also deliver peripheral and sensationalised information, exposing them to risks.
   However, for the current information delivery media to develop further in the future, we believe that children should be able to learn and interact with these digital media.
   Therefore, it would be better to give them the opportunity to be exposed to the right media and educate them.

3. What is a good approach to teaching children multimodal literacy in the age of images?
: The ability to understand various information includes seeing, hearing, and feeling, and we know that literacy is mainly about understanding things in written form.
Conveying various information through images seems easier to approach by first conveying the same information and easy things.

4. I’m seeking specific ways to help kids understand and empower visual culture. But will 9–12-year-olds be able to understand this, and is this something desirable for them? Communication through images is possible from infancy to adulthood to the elderly. I think the understanding of this is related to their interests.

For children under 13, it seems that their interests can be understood through various images.

5. And how will this affect the mental health of teenagers later in life?
   Children in their teens are now getting a lot of their information through visual culture, which can impact them as adults.
   It can also affect their value system.
   However, in terms of future cognition, increasing thought density can also help prevent dementia, so it’s important to expose them to various healthy media to help them think deeply and use good language. To think deeply and use good language.

“Inspiration is for amateurs.” “All the best ideas come out of the process.”

Tina Seeling, faculty member at Stanford University, talks about creativity in the broadest sense and the three stages of creativity for people who want to transform the world.

Stage 1 IMAGINATION

Engagement: Art historian Jennifer Roberts’s class. 3 hours of just looking at an artwork and building a relationship with it. Deeply understand the object.

“Most people think you envision what you want to do, and then you make it happen. But engagement is the first step; you need to engage.”

Envision: Set a problem to solve and draw your own boundaries.

Stage 2 CREATIVITY

Motivation: Danial Pink -Autonomy, fulfilment and meaning become the beginning of motivation, and then the experiment could be started.

Stage 3 INNOVATION

focus /reframing:Deeply focused, but breaking the mould and creating something new.

There are creativity myths: prevalence and correlates of misconceptions on creativity. 1.Children are more creative than adults. Inspiration is important. It’s a very common misconception that bright ideas are good. These are concepts that are common to all cultures and countries.

2. Creative ideas need a break: Brainstorming is only helpful for people who are vocal and like to lead; brainstorming itself does not generate creative ideas.

What happens in our brains.

The ability to look at things in a new way.

Three networks are active in the brain. The Default Mode Network (DMN), an area of the brain that is active when you are in a daze or daydreaming, is activated.

CEM(Central Executive Network: Sustained attention (the part of the brain involved in complex problem solving and memory)

SN(Salience Network: Choose the internal cues of the moment, acting as a switch to focus or daze.

Creative work is possible when you are immersed and think deeply. Creative people have developed the ability to switch between creative and editing modes freely by following a rigid routine rather than being spontaneous.

WHY ART?

Why incorporating traditional, simple arts and crafts into a workshop with children is beneficial in this digital age.

Art and craft activities stimulate creativity and imagination in children. These activities encourage them to think outside the box and express themselves uniquely.

Art provides a safe outlet for children to express their emotions. Through colors, shapes, and textures, children can explore and communicate feelings that they might not yet be able to articulate verbally.

Crafting often involves figuring out how to turn a concept into a physical object. This process enhances problem-solving skills and encourages critical thinking as children plan and execute their projects.

Art and craft activities require a level of concentration and focus. Engaging in these activities can help children develop a longer attention span, which is beneficial for academic learning.

In a world increasingly dominated by screens, traditional art and craft offer a valuable balance. They provide a tactile, hands-on experience that is essential for child development.

Completing an art or craft project gives children a sense of achievement. This success boosts their confidence and encourages them to take on new challenges.

References:

Benedek, M., Karstendiek, M., Ceh, S. M., Grabner, R. H., Krammer, G., Lebuda, I., … & Kaufman, J. C. (2021). Creativity myths: Prevalence and correlates of misconceptions on creativity. Personality and Individual Differences, 182, 111068.

Seelig, T. (2017). Creativity Rules: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and into the World. HarperOne; Reprint edition.

Since the last intervention at the library, I have been thinking about working with or for children. I’d like to start by talking about children’s portrait rights.

Throughout this year, I’ve been practising getting my point across without using images and keeping this blog as visual aid-free as possible. But in this case, I think watching this is a good substitute for what I’m worried about.

This is a very old problem. The term digital kidnapping was talked about a lot about five years ago, and we’ve been talking about protecting children’s portrait rights for 10 years, and it’s become a more sophisticated issue.
Now, what do we do about kids posting pictures of themselves?

A lot of the difficulty with this project was that there were no answers. It felt like a ruthless French bureaucrat kept shouting, “it depends”. Even the psychiatrist said, “It’s different for everybody, it’s different for every child, it’s different for every parent, it’s out of your hands, the doctors are all on different sides.

For me, there was no answer. I was not qualified to work with children. What I knew about children was based on a very small sample. I held art workshops to hear their voices, to hear what they wanted.
I could listen, and it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and there were things I shouldn’t have heard. Why the little girl said she wanted to stab herself in the heart with a pencil, I can’t analyse. Did she watch a dramatic film before coming? Was she self-destructive? Did she want to make an impression? Did she want to know how I would respond?

I suggested it might be fun to metaphorically transform that. Could it not be something like the wind, rather than a pencil?

She accurately said that she literally wanted to stick a pencil into her heart.

“Oh, I should have brought crayons instead of pencils. Good thing I don’t have scissors.” These thoughts just flashed through my mind and I responded positively, praising and admiring everything about her—every single line she drew—to the best of my ability. If I did this to my boss, I’d probably already be promoted.

She shared something . The other parent who was there pretended not to hear, and the other girl consoled her by saying that it was mum’s thing.

I realised that I wasn’t good enough to be a supporter of children, and I was thinking a lot about whether I should just go back to making films that would have a good impact on children. To be of practical help, I need to be close to them. What is it about me that will make them trust and let me work with them?

https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/16597/4/Gallacher_Methodological_immaturity_in_childhood_research.pdf

Gallacher, L.A. and Gallagher, M., 2008. Methodological immaturity in childhood research? Thinking throughparticipatory methods’. Childhood, 15(4), pp.499-516. 

In the early stages, I modified the intervention from a paper kit to a digital version in order to alleviate the discomfort felt by participants in the first experiment. However, this solution only addressed a temporary issue, and it came to my attention that it could not resolve their difficulties due to excessive and persistent media exposure.

I had become frustrated that I was just one person on this issue and wondered what we could do about it. The director of HAIL TO HELL, who was invited to the Korean Film Festival in London, suggested in an interview that youth solidarity might offer a solution, but we need to hang in there. Modern life promotes individualism and we may thus feel lonely and isolated. Some may seek comfort in the digital world, just as the participants did when I urgently digitised the intervention.

I considered bringing participants together in a collective space, connecting them and then letting them focus on their own worlds. This method introduced a type of ‘visualisation meditation together’, which benefited children and fostered connections between families without the use of digital media. We as humans possess a natural inclination to unite and coexist, yet it appears we live in isolation behind invisible barriers, often trying to comfort ourselves. This small activity is hoped to initiate unity, barrier breakage and the creation of a space for peace.

There are not many programs available for children currently, but thankfully, institutions like the Tate Museum and V&A offer programs for kids. However, these may not satisfy the diverse needs of preteens. Most formal art education starts at 16, but fortunately, UAL offers a program called ‘Future Creatives’ targeted at children aged 7 to 12, conducted in several locations.

In reality, children who want to pursue art often find it challenging to continuously engage in their interests, and most private art institutions tend to be overlooked by parents.

If more credible institutions, perhaps universities, offered a wider variety of classes for future generations, it would greatly benefit children. However, there seems to be a reluctance, possibly due to financial non-viability. Using iPads, children can experiment without material costs. But it’s not just about developing drawing skills; fostering imagination, exploring different mediums, and discovering personal interests are crucial. This approach ensures that children’s thinking remains unconfined and expansive when transitioning to digital formats.

My project explores the intersection of digital media evolution and preteen empowerment, aiming to navigate the complexities of the modern digital landscape where technology continually reshapes communication and creation. As the capabilities of smartphone cameras surge and a plethora of apps democratize video production, even for children, the project examines how this democratization impacts young minds.

In particular, the focus is on the double-edged nature of accessibility: while creative expression is unprecedentedly easy, the excessive exposure to digital content can overwhelm and potentially lead to dopamine-driven feedback loops, affecting concentration and satisfaction.

Using AI image generation as a tool to address time scarcity among teens, driven by packed schedules and the daunting gap between creative aspiration and skill. Using AI as a creative assistant, rather than a replacement, could foster both skill development and artistic expression, redirecting from consumption to creation.

My project seeks to balance leveraging the benefits of digital advances and mitigating the risks of excessive media consumption. It advocates for educational and parental frameworks that promote healthy digital habits, ensuring that children can harness digital tools to enhance their learning, creativity, and well-being.