Tracing the Contours of His Shifting Form: Haptic Animation as Analysis

• In Event: Visual Inquiries Into Borders and Perimeters of Learning

Abstract

The scene opens on the fuzzy outline of a figure—dark eyes, beanie and pale brown skin just visible through the scrim. As he begins to speak, a large hand enters the foreground, orangey fingers wrapped around the neck of a “Number 2” pencil. Coming in at an angle, the sharpened tip meets paper and marks down along the right edge of his jawline. He begins to speak: “Something that I do as an educator that can’t be measured is build relationships with my students,” and as his body shifts, moving in closer to the screen and leaning back (rocking slightly), the hand and pencil shift too. He continues to speak and the pencil works to keep up, lifting and meeting the paper with each gesture, attempting to touch and trace the borders of his moving form.

I made this video animation as a tool of arts-based analysis in the context of a broader study on the invisible work of teaching in urban schools. In 2013-14, the first year of “Advance,” a New York state teacher assessment policy (linking teacher evaluations to student test scores), I worked with a group of ten radical New York City public school teachers to chart their reflections on practice both inside and outside the contours of Advance. After learning and collaborating together over a semester, we set out to produce an activist-art piece. Together we developed a participatory Tumblr site and called it, “Those Who Can” (a retort to the old adage, “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach”). The multimedia blog asks a broader public of educators, “What do you do that can’t be measured?” and invites them to answer back with videos, images, or text.

In addition to traditional qualitative modes of analysis such as transcription and narrative analysis, I created a series of twenty video animations as a way to make sense of the twelve Tumblr videos. In each animation I trace the teacher’s speaking form with different tools—paint, acrylic ink, pencil—and in different patterns. For example, in one video my hand works to outline the shapes of a white teacher’s speaking lips as she wonders at whether evaluation rubrics can measure her ability “to help her students explore themselves as young people.,” In the haptic up-close of these videos (Marks, 2004), in the hand’s dual efforts to bring forward and cover over the teachers’ forms, the moving images play at themes of in/visibility, representation, and measurement.

In this presentation, I will share a series of the video animations and discuss what I learned in and through making them about the figures’ facial expressions, movements, gestures, and speech—a process akin to Silva’s (2016) concept of “video editing as analysis.” Finally, I theorize these works as haptic countervisualities (Marks 2004; Mirzoeff 2011), works which evoke (in making and viewing) an intimate, tactile aesthetic that stands in sharp contrast to dominant neoliberal technocratic representations of teachers and teaching work.

Author

• Victoria G Restler, Rhode Island College