Plato and Brancusi on Branding and Responsible Media

One of Constanin Brancusi's "Bird in Space" series, an attempt to capture the essence of flight and movement

One of the central question that comes up at the Global Engagement Summit is how students responsibly represent and tell stories of the people they work with and the problems they seek to address. How does one use photographs, videos, or other media to make geographically distant people feel connected to a community without falling into old tropes and stereotypes of victimization and misery? A 20th century Romanian artist may have the answer.

Last weekend, Daniel and Harish of Project Focus helped a group of delegates at GES2009 think through just those questions. The framework they use is one shared by them with a professor of theirs at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The basic premise of the framework is that the people we feel most connected to and are most willing to sacrifice for and share with are those people who are real and related - family, for example. On the other hand, the "truly others" as they put it, are those who are abstract - those we only have some basic intellectual conception of, and with whom we've never experienced a conversation or a meal or any shared setting - and unrelated - as in their joy or sadness feels like it has little to do with us.

Project Focus tries to use collaborative media creation to better connect communities of youth in Chicago and Lyantonde, Uganda. In Uganda, they help young people tell their own stories by providing cameras and artistic workshops. The media that is created is exhibited in interactive ways in Chicago, where communities iterate and build upon that work to create their own remixes, which are then exhibited and displayed back in Uganda, and so on. Their goal, simply, is to move people from "abstract and unrelated" to "real and related."

As we were all talking in their workshop, I began thinking about Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian artist born in 1876 who was one of the leading influences on modernist sculpture.

Brancusi was extremely attracted to the ideas of thinkers like Plato, who suggested that each manifestation of a particular material item - a chair for example - drew their essence from a common source (or Form, as Plato called them). The Form of Chair had all the characteristics and properties that any chair manifest in the world might have, and each actual material chair was nothing more than a representation of the deeper essence.

Brancusi's reflection upon this was to ask why, as an artist, he would be concerned about making a literalist painting or sculpture of a chair - or put another way, a representation of a representation - when instead he could go about trying to unlock the essence of the thing. Brancusi produced some of the most profoundly different and influential work of the early 20th century, such as "Bird in Space" above.

It struck me that when we think about responsible media, what we're really trying to do is find images, videos, or stories, that implicate a particular way of seeing by their very presence. When we're trying to find the perfect image to compel people to support HIV/AIDS treatment in Africa, we're looking for media that says: "These people and communities are powerful, and full of potential, but ravaged by a disease that we ourselves have learned to control but have also allowed to persist for others because of a market failure which denies them the life-saving drugs they can't afford. We can do something about that. We have a stake in them and they have a stake in us."

That's quite a bit for any one photo to say, but it's not necessarily too much for a brand to say. Brands tend to be imbued with meaning over time, rather than having intrinsic meaning. "Project Focus" means nothing to most readers of this post, but to me it means "the pursuit of more responsible, humanizing media." Brands can be cultivated to tell extraordinarily complex stories and inspire action with extremely simple symbols.

I wonder how much irresponsible media is actually symptomatic of an irresponsible worldview and irresponsible action which starts from the division of the world into the philanthropists and those to be helped? I wonder if the photos of fly-bitten, distended-bellied children are effect, not cause?

It seems to me that the answer might be at least in part, a focus on building brands like Project Focus that put on display the essence or form of better connecting the talent that so permeates our world with the opportunity that is so unevenly distributed.