Interactive video installation "Millennials": convergent approach in education and Collective Performance

Magidovich Marina ORCID: 0000-0003-0747-1078 Professor; Department of Theory and History of Culture; A.I.Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University 191186, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Malaya Posadskaya str., 26, room 304 maguidov@mail.ru

Iushchenko Uliana independent researcher 198328, Russia, Saint Petersburg, 28 Valor street, sq. 20 ulya.yushchenko@mail.ru

Introduction

The article presents the materials and conclusions of a cultural study of the university art project "Children of the Noughties", which combines elements of a pedagogical experiment, collective performance and a theatrical immersive multimedia art exhibition created using the principles of multiscreen and interactivity by a creative team consisting of a group of students and a teacher. The exhibition project was developed and implemented by the second graduation of cultural educators who studied under the new module "Museum and Theater Pedagogy" at the turn of the Year of the teacher and mentor and the Year of the Family. The opening of the exhibition took place on 12/21/2023, in the space of the technopark of the Institute of Human Philosophy of the Herzen State Pedagogical University. Since the article does not involve watching a video, to create a visual image, we will briefly describe the opening of the exhibition.

Before the acting director of the institute Denis Vladimirovich Ignatiev cut the ribbon in front of the closed door of the exhibition, Anastasia Sokolova moved the audience to tears by reciting her own poem "Visiting Childhood" on a chair in front of the entrance, inspired by the preparation for the event:

"...You will find our childhood in the yard,

Where was the scary monster hiding in the mountain?

Where we were friends, believed, loved,

Did you bury the treasure, did you go camping?...".

Then the curators of the exhibition Anna Avimskaya and Ulyana Yushchenko talked about how the childhood of those born in the early years of our century differs from the childhood of other generations. Behind the closed door, the audience discovered a magical space similar to a music box or a kaleidoscope with flickering colored lights, where the characters Angela (Moskalenko) and Nastya (Temir-Bulatova), sitting on warm ottomans, offered treats from their childhood and showed how to play yo-yo and other children's fun of the early 2000s, who were on the table at the entrance. On the big TV of the late 1990s, the cartoon "Bratz: Fashionable Fairies" was broadcast. In the window opening, instead of a dark courtyard, children's images of singers, figure skaters, ballerinas, millionaires, prosecutors floated out – the dreams of children at the beginning of our century. Children's fears were hidden on the floor under the batteries in old boxes: spiders, monsters, etc. After enjoying lemonade and children's sweets, visitors actively filled out the once popular children's Questionnaire of a friend.

The exhibition Children of the Noughties is a full-fledged artistic, educational and scientific project created as a model of working with students within the university environment, the purpose of which is to acquire professional competencies by participants, consolidate the knowledge gained during the passage of such disciplines as "Modern technologies in museum activities", "Methods and technologies of organizing exposition and exhibition space", "Museum Art Pedagogy", "Sociology of Museum and Theater audiences", etc.

According to the authors, the exhibition "Children of the Noughties", which has become a university project, can be implemented as a museum exhibition of contemporary art and transformed depending on the specifics of the space and the theme of the museum.

The relevance of the research is due to the performative and psychological turns in art and social sciences, the increased interest in art pedagogy and art therapy, as well as new requirements for modern museum and exhibition activities ^[1] and the educational environment of universities.

The subject of the research is an artistic and pedagogical experiment of the Institute of Human Philosophy of the Herzen State Pedagogical University in the form of a group immersive ^[11] exhibition "Children of the Noughties", the authors and creators of which are a creative team consisting of a teacher and 15 students. The subject of the exhibition itself was the culture of childhood in Russia in the first decade of the 21st century. It was during these years that the childhood of students took place, 13 of whom were born in the 2002's, and two in 1998 and 1999.

Having proposed the theme of the exhibition, indirectly dedicated to their own biography, the main exhibition statement was the self-presentation of the authors through the optics of nostalgia for childhood. The selection of the theme and the approval of the name of the exhibition took place collectively for about 2-3 weeks. The theme and title determined the further methodology of the development and the methodology of the creation and display of the exhibition.

Theoretical and methodological framework of the study

The teacher chose a convergent approach as the theoretical and methodological basis of the project, implying the absence of "interdisciplinary boundaries between scientific and technological knowledge" ^[8]. In addition, in order to obtain the factual data necessary for creating an exposition and their visualization, as well as as a managerial technology, the "Action research" method, widely used in foreign pedagogy, was used, the essence of which is to acquire competencies "by solving a certain problem that arose in the course of activity. Thus, through conducting research in action, the teacher makes changes to his teaching practice" ^[6]. In this case, the study goes through 5 main stages: "1. Definition of the problem. 2. Data collection. 3. Data analysis. 4. Activities based on the data obtained. 5. Reflection" ^{[6, p.96]}.

The subject-environment approach was also chosen, which is actively used in modern higher school pedagogy, art therapy and art pedagogy, taking into account both the influence of the subject environment on personal development and the psychosomatic state of the subject, and the role of creating a comfortable, safe environment by students themselves in their self-realization and social activity ^[10].

The main approaches were determined by the research methods: formal descriptive and structural-typological methods of description and analysis of artistic and pedagogical experiment, as well as sociological methods of specific research: case study, included observation, focused survey, anonymous questionnaire. In the field of designing the exhibition space, the method of total performative audiovisual installation of the "black box" type was used. In many ways, the research was based on the theory of cultural capital and social space by Pierre Bourdieu.

Choosing the exhibition space as a socio-psychological problem

The selection and coordination of the premises for the exhibition revealed a number of social problems. Since the exhibition was developed by graduate students, they sought to use their own experience gained during three years of communication in the university space. In general, the following opinions were voiced by the participants:

1) The exhibition can only be placed within the premises of the department or the premises of the technopark assigned to it, due to fierce competition between various departments of the institute and the negative attitude of teachers of other departments towards them ("no one likes us", "they will scream if they see", etc.).

2) the redi of the premises proposed by the administration in the dean's office area, the students chose an open opening under the stairs. As it turned out later, almost none of the creators of the exhibition had their own room in childhood, or their parents did not allow the door to be closed in the children's room, so the room was chosen the smallest and most inconspicuous, contrary to the logic of the preservation of the exposition and its promotion.

At this stage, the diagnostic value of the environment as a stimulus material was revealed, which made it possible to understand the psychosomatic state of students, to identify their anxiety. At the same time, the search for "one's place" in the university space led to the emergence of semantic images ^[9], the emergence of spatial metaphors of childhood, self-identification as creators ^[13]. There was an interiorization of the conceptual apparatus of P. Bourdieu's theory of the interaction of social and physical spaces ^[3]. Awareness of the reflection of social space in the allocation and assignment of university premises by staff helped participants to live the experience necessary for the design of museum exhibitions and the scenography of theatrical performances in the future.

The choice of the room, which took place in the form of a collective interventionist performance along the corridors of the university, largely contributed to the selection and approval of the performative nature and structure of the planned exposition. The support of the director of the institute, who provided advisory assistance during the discussions in the corridor, turned out to be important. The smallest auditorium of the techno park, designed for laboratory classes and resembling a 3x3x3 meter cube in size, was agreed with the administration.

The concept of the exhibition

At the next stage, based on the chosen room, a three-level vertical structure of the exposition based on universal mythological representations of the three worlds was proposed by the teacher (the author of the article) as the main concept of the exhibition space, and the group approved it. The lower world was supposed to contain images of children's fears, the middle one was supposed to represent the world of things surrounding the child in everyday and play culture, in the upper world it was supposed to represent the visualized dreams of children in 2003-2010. To form the exposition, an anonymous survey of the group was conducted, during which students were asked to recall and list their childhood fears, dreams, and favorite things. As a result, answers were received, among which were repeatedly repeated both universal (archetypal) and relevant statements related to the era and television content of the 2010s.:

Fears: darkness, height, spiders, an electric train, getting lost in a supermarket, evil heroes of television content: Maleficent, Night monsters, a spinning top bites the side, a girl from the horror movie "Bell", an Iron nanny from the TV series "Smeshariki", the program "Battle of psychics", etc.

Computers, Baby Born dolls, stuffed toys with cartoon characters, and a yo-yo game were named as favorite things. Chewing gums with tattoos and Huba Buba, Kinder Surprise, Albums and collections with stickers from cartoons, animation discs and TV shows of animated series, costumes for matinees, summer trips to the sea and to grandma's cottage.

The professions of flight attendants, dancers, singers were named as the childhood dreams of girls, young men in childhood wanted to become millionaires, prosecutors, surf and travel to different countries and galaxies. In addition, dreams of new tape recorders, animation discs, computers, etc. were sometimes mentioned.

After determining the approximate content of the exhibition, formed on the basis of the first survey, students were asked to fill out a questionnaire in which they had to specify: 1) the name of the exhibition; 2) the area of personal responsibility (sound design, poster design, video content, etc.); 3) exhibits for the exhibition, which each member of the group is ready to bring for display;4) draw a sketch of the exposition with the main sections of the exhibition.

According to the results of the second survey, the name of the exhibition "Children of the Noughties", proposed by Ivan Fadeev, was chosen by voting in several stages, and its format was determined as a total installation and the type of main exhibits. The mandatory components of the installation were named: a TV, discs and cassettes with animation, a desk with a children's table lamp in the form of a toy, a push-button mobile phone, a music listening area, board games, poster collections, a yo-yo game, it was also conventionally decided to create objects embodying personal fears and develop a videocontent that visualizes students' dreams.

Exhibition preparation / collective performance

One of the significant results identified during the preparation of the exhibition is the intergenerational gaps associated with the various cultural capital of childhood and the cultural codes of the teaching and student generations. Requests for explanations on decoding the names of memes mentioned by young people, heroes of children's games and films during the development of the project caused the need to think through special excursions and art mediation for the teaching staff. The preparation of the exhibition "Children of the Noughties" has become not only a space of intercultural communications and a research field for teachers and students, but also institutionalized as a collective performance, which, according to scientists, is distinguished by: "collectivity as a means and purpose of work, participation (involvement and complicity), procedural, communicative, identity of performer and character, heteronomy (hybridity)" ^{[7, p.8]}.

The exhibition preparation process has become a platform for active communication between the participants of the exhibition process on the one hand and a dialogue between the student audience and teachers on the other. Being the creators of the exhibition project, the students simultaneously played the role of museum staff, artists and the public involved in art mediation and participatory practices aimed not at passive perception, but at the active role of the viewer in creating and transforming the exhibition space, involving attention to the visitor's motivation, psychological and cognitive needs ^[5]. At the same time, the collective performance for the preparation of the exhibition extended beyond the educational classes, involving students from other groups and parents in communication to collect objects and photographs.

The exhibition "Children of the Noughties" became an opportunity for students not only to declare themselves and their generational characteristics, as they stated when choosing a topic. Plunging into memories while searching for the material attributes of the exhibition, the students wanted to feel nostalgia, plunge into childhood, remember and preserve the historical facts of everyday culture of Russia at the beginning of our century, which was reflected in the annotation to the exhibition: "The performative video installation "Children of the Noughties" is a time machine that takes us to carefree days when every day we were looking forward to the release of a new episode of our favorite animated series on TV, collected our own collections of posters and stickers, and showed the most popular clips on MTV, which became the voice of our generation." (A fragment of the text of the annotation of the exhibition by A.Avimskaya and U.Yushchenko).

Identification with a common past contributed to the consolidation of the student group and the self-realization of each of its members, gave the opportunity to express themselves in a new capacity as a curator (Anna Avimskaya, Ulyana Yushchenko), sculptor (Elena Nemirova, Dmitry Pokrovsky, Elena Dibrova, Stepan Nemogai, Anastasia Smirnova), performance poet (Anastasia Sokolova), character and art mediator (Anastasia Temir-Bulatova, Angela Moskalenko, Ulyana Yushchenko), video editing director (Ivan Fadeev), exhibition architect (Ivan Fadeev, Anastasia Farafonova, Angela Moskalenko, Stepan Nemogai, Anastasia Smirnova, Anastasia Temir-Bulatova) and computer 3 D designer (Dmitry Pokrovsky, Anastasia Temir-Bulatova), exhibition designer (Arzu Aliyeva), lighting designer (Anastasia Sokolova, Dmitry Pokrovsky, Anastasia Smirnova), chief curator (Anastasia Sokolova) and graphic designer (Anna Avimskaya, Ivan Fadeev) or feel like workers at the installation and dismantling of the exhibition (Valery Tsvirov, Ivan Fadeev, Stepan Nemogai).

Enumerations of students' job responsibilities show the involvement of the same actors in different professional roles, which proves the performative characteristics of event preparation and exhibition holding, its participativeness and hybridity. According to the researcher and performer R.Osminkina, "modern collective performances are complex micro-laboratories of artistic, socio-cultural and everyday interaction within the framework of an undifferentiated life experience" ^{[7, p.8]}.

Opening and holding of the exhibition

The choice of exhibits and the spatial solution of its exposition were discussed by students during face-to-face classes at the university, their main criterion was the mass character in the culture of Russia of the studied period. Legitimacy was determined by the recognition of a particular exhibition object by all project participants or at least 80% of the group. During the installation of the exhibition, the participants rejected "narrowly focused objects" and approved only generally recognized toys, magazines, and cartoons. Everyone offered a variant of what they could add from their personal belongings, and the group coordinated each element of the future exhibition. The general concept and organization of the space during the installation was taken together with the teacher.

The main elements of lighting and design were also provided with fashionable decorative "sunset" and children's zoomorphic lamps and textiles collected by students.

The preparation of the exhibition poster was also of a participatory nature. Expressive, but too expressive and harsh, in the opinion of classmates, the image of childhood proposed by I. Fadeev was replaced by a collage of children's photographs of the group members, the collection and approval of which took on a performative character, which can be explained by the spread of screen images and familiar network communications of students to the real physical space.

As Anna Avimskaya, the curator and author of the exhibition poster, recalls, "The idea of designing the poster for the exhibition came to us through a general brainstorming. Today, one of the trends in social networks and media is the publication of their own children's photos from the 1990s – 2000s, taken both on film and on digital cameras that appeared by the beginning and middle of the noughties. It has become incredibly interesting for people to retrospectively compare themselves from childhood with themselves today. In general, this trend should be attributed both to the popularity of universal nostalgia for childhood and to the trend of nostalgia for the period of the early and mid-noughties. This led to the idea of using our children's photos in the materials of the poster. Another question was how organically these photos would look as a whole, so it was decided to create a general collage of photos with the name of the exhibition on top of it. The font was also written manually, without using ready-made templates. This is an attempt to create a "careless" inscription, as if made by a child."

Due to the small size of the exhibition space and the image of a children's room filled with wonders and fears from childhood, the design of the exhibition was planned and implemented in the format of a total installation "black box" ^[2] using the principles of multi-screen ^{[12, pp.121-127]}. A darkened room was also necessary for the projection of videos containing children's photos and the drawings of the participants depicting their dreams and dreams in the early years of their lives. The interactive nature of the exhibition was enhanced by the opportunity to listen to the hits of the 2000s, which, in the words of A.Avimskaya, became "the favorite songs of our childhood."

One of the important tasks of the project was a lively dialogue between students and teachers, especially important was the seminar and art mediation at the exhibition held for teachers of the Department of Art and Design of Murmansk Arctic University.

In conclusion, we can note the heuristic potential and pedagogical significance of such projects. The refocusing of cultural optics on art criticism, psychological, pedagogical and sociological aspects carried out in the course of the study made it possible to identify the performative basis of the studied case, to determine the artistic form and design of the exhibition component of the project. The socio-psychological monitoring conducted during the preparation of the exhibition in the form of focused surveys and discussions, as a rule, acquired the characteristics of art mediation, stimulating creativity, imagination and agency of members of the creative team, contributed to the self-identification of the group as a collective author and performer of a creative idea, taking into account the contribution and significance of each.

Conclusions:

1) Students are interested in modern forms of exhibition statements aimed at dialogue and discussion, actively strive to develop participatory artistic practices aimed at self-realization and agency.

2) Nostalgia for early childhood can be recognized as one of the characteristics of student youth, which can be explained by the feeling of insecurity of twenty-year-old students, the desire to distance themselves from situations associated with risks and uncertainty before graduating from university.

3) Cultural representations and the worldview of young generations are largely shaped by media content in childhood, which is often underestimated and little studied in cultural studies and art studies.

4) The dependence of generational cultural codes and the structure of everyday life on television content viewed in preschool and primary school age by modern youth can cause problems of interpretation of images and meanings in intergenerational communication related to the various spectator experiences of teachers and students.

5) The organization of an exhibition project in the form of a collective educational performance contributes not only to the growth of professional competence of future professionals, but can also become the basis for convergent research and development of significant museum projects.

6) The organization of collective student art exhibitions by future cultural educators contributes to the consolidation of the studied material in a number of socio-humanitarian and artistic disciplines. Along with professional competencies, such practices contribute to the acquisition of personal, general cultural and other competencies, which must be studied in research on higher education pedagogy.

7) The primary conclusions obtained in the course of a sociological study aimed at obtaining data on cultural memory and ideas of modern youth about the early years of the 21st century require additional measurements and can be used in further research in the field of microsociology, modern history, biographical research, etc.

8)The conducted artistic and pedagogical experiment has shown the effectiveness of combining a convergent approach with the method of "research in action" (Action research) and can be recommended when organizing and conducting interactive events by a creative team consisting of students and teachers in higher education and museum pedagogy when working with the public.