When I began this project earlier in the summer, my Teaching and Learning with Technology team and I talked a lot about how I would be exposing my ideas to the public in ways that would make me uncomfortable. Well, here is a case in point: the mockup of the video we are trying to produce about a dimension of the Socratic practice of politics. The video is designed to reach out to a broader audience than either my traditional scholarly work or my work in the classroom.
What appears below is a mockup of the outline of a video we did for a group of digital designers who will try to translate our vision of the video into something remotely coherent. In the mockup, Allan Gyorke and I, with excellent camera work by Matt Meyer, try to show the various scenes of a video in which Socrates begins searching for justice with Glaucon and ends up joined by a diverse group of historical figures who have, each in a different way, sought justice.
So now, for you viewing pleasure, I present this mockup, which, I imagine, is itself destined to be mocked.
OK, having seen this, let me give you a chance to catch your breath and gather your composure...
Now that you have picked yourself off the floor, it is perhaps helpful to talk about the basic message we are trying to convey. That message was articulated to some degree in my previous post on Justice Rolling Around.
The central idea is that justice is not something existing objectively outside the human attempt to articulate it but rather, justice emerges, when it emerges, in the course of the human attempt to seek, articulate and locate justice itself.
It has been fun to think about how this might be conveyed visually in a way that would draw people to the question of justice and thus toward activities that encourage its manifestation.
The passage around with the video is organized is from the Republic. It captures something of the playful dimensions of Socrates' search for justice. We hope that once the video is produced the playfulness of the search will be felt in the cartoon figures of Socrates, Glaucon, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman and the other figures we include.
You might be perplexed by the tissue that we are blowing around and having pass in front of the picture of the thicket. We will try to gesture to justice as it appears in the course of our speaking and seeking it by having little wisps of breathy air move with, around and between the characters. This visual is meant to suggest the manifestation of a justice, elusive yet apparent, that shows itself as communities join together in search of justice.
Even as I look forward to the final product, I am aware of how much I have learned in being forced to think about how to express philosophical ideas in a visual medium like video which is meant to reach out to a wider audience. There will, of course, be some simplifying, but there is room for nuance even as we try to make the video compelling. This mockup is a silly but important part of the process which now has been exposed in its own right - for better and/or worse.
