Update: A recording of the webinar has just been released by the McMaster Museum of Art. The short sections where I speak about Shadowpox and the role of art in changing perspectives are cued up below.
Citizen science fiction, Captain America, and the X-Men:
"Who is my neighbour?" – The teaching stories of Spider-Man and Black Panther:
Moderator: Steven Hoffman, Director, Global Strategy Lab, York University
Panelists: Annemarie Hou, Executive Director, UN Office for Partnerships Alison Humphrey, Vanier Scholar, York University Lauren Paremoer, Senior Lecturer, University of Cape Town John-Arne Røttingen, Norway’s Ambassador for Global Health
Please see the webinar registration page for full bios, and check out what's coming up next in the series:
<Immune Nations>, an evidence-based exhibition about the constructive role that art can play in public discourse around life-saving vaccines, will open at the McMaster Museum of Art on September 2!
Daniel Recollet Mejaki, Samantha Brennan and Bruce Naokwegijig reflect on the December 2018 workshop Shadowpox: The Cytokine Storm, at Debajehmujig Storytellers, Manitoulin Island, 26 October 2020.
Guest editor and research-creation trailblazer Natalie Loveless introduces the project, which I had the good fortune to join just before starting my doctorate, thus:
Initiated in 2014, <Immune Nations> brought together scientists, policy experts, academic scholars, and artists to work on an interdisciplinary and collaborative research-creation project tackling complex issues related to the use and distribution of vaccines in the world today.
The project… aimed to address a gap between knowledge about vaccines and how they work, and vaccine reception in the public imaginary, including fears and misinformation.
All the contributions to the <Immune Nations> special issue are worth a read, but I'm going to link here to the two I wrote or co-authored:
The Shadowpox game was created with a simple goal: to help players imagine the effects their seemingly private vaccination choices had on the friends, family, strangers, colleagues and neighbours around them. Actually, that wasn't originally the goal. It was only in the process of developing the game that I realized my design mindset was blind to one of the major reasons vaccines work: herd immunity, a concept that has jumped to the forefront of debates about public health policy responses to Covid-19. The middle section of this 2018 talk (from 4:55 to 12:10) explains how the game's design evolved as my understanding did:
I'm half design geek, half drama nerd, so it was even more exciting when the storyworld expanded into its second, participatory-storytelling phase.
This 2019 video from York University's Office for Research and Innovation sets the game in the context of the wider research-creation project:
"In a world plagued by a deadly new disease composed of viral shadows, young, healthy volunteers across the globe step forward to test a breakthrough vaccine.
"Shadowpox is an immersive science-fiction storyworld that imagines community immunity both as a public health phenomenon, and as a metaphor for any voluntary collective effort."
Science & Fiction (FILM 3841, Digital Culture) takes a mixed-reality approach to experiential education, blending academic study with dramatic composition and digital production.
In addition to more traditional ways of learning about the biology and sociology of immunization, students will create videos in which they play volunteers in the Phase I trial of a vaccine against the shadowpox virus.
Designing a networked sci-fi narrative to build scientific, civic and media literacy, Shadowpox invites participants to grapple with one of the thorniest political dilemmas of public health: voluntary participation in the collective good.
In the spirit of international collaboration that marks the Covid-19 research effort (as well as Shadowpox research-creation in the UK, Canada and South Africa), I'm working with York's Immersive Storytelling Lab on an online complement to the course – one that will invite teachers and learners to explore the concepts and conflicts around vaccination through this co-created work of “citizen science fiction.”
It's hard right now to visualize what our world will look like by the end of the year, but I also can't picture anything I'd rather be doing than collaborating with young people to imagine and build a future of co-immunity.
The round hole...the square peg. If neither bends, which will break?
A left-handed boy is just beginning school. In 1979 China, conformity is a matter of survival, so his teacher convinces his father to correct his 'problem' for the boy's own good.
At home and at school, the boy struggles to understand his place in the world, guided only by the sage advice of an ambidextrous street-corner barber.
Then one day, his father sprains his right wrist in a bicycle accident...
Left-Handed
Canada, 2002, 10 min
Cast
Daniel Yan, Arthur Cheng, Xiao-Ming Yu, Xingfa Zhang, Fu Yu
Crew Director: Baoqi Ye Producer: Alison Humphrey Screenwriter: Baoqi Ye & Alison Humphrey Editor: Peter Yu Cinematographer: Jeff Maher Original Score: Kirk Elliott Sound: Rob Turi Design: April Viczko
Produced in the Sheridan College Advanced Television and Film program, 2002.
Distribution: The Movie Network, Air Canada, Cathay Pacific Airlines, Facets.org.
Awards 2004 Chicago International Children's Film Festival – Montgomery Prize Certificate of Excellence, Best Film or Video by an Emerging Director, Baoqi Ye. 2003 Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards – Best Cinematography, Student Category, Jeff Maher. 2003 WorldFest Houston – Gold Award, Graduate Level Student Production 2002 Anchorage International Film Festival – Best Super Short Film
About the Director Baoqi Ye graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai, receiving his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Industrial Design. Ye worked for Ogilvy & Mather Advertising Shanghai first as Art Director, then as Creative Group Head. He has created dozens of commercials for clients like Vespa Scooters, Siemens Home Appliances and Beck's Beer. The Beck's campaign won both Gold and Silver medals in the Times International Chinese Advertising Awards organized by Taiwan Times Newspaper.
