The Missing Note

While studying the role language plays in shaping human thought, students study the linguistic turn of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, and the research of Ong and Goody, Luria, and Panksepp.

In this film, students challenge themselves to step outside the fly-bottle of language and imagine something set before culture, before biology, and before language itself: music. Here, our seniors imagine meaningful understanding provided by music as an alternative to a written or descriptive linguistic system.

Lost at Sea

The way we describe our world determines the way we think about it. Metaphors and description, therefore, shape our thought. While studying the role language plays in shaping human thought, students study the linguistic turn of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, and the research of Ong and Goody, Luria, and Panksepp.

In this film project, students were asked to think carefully and critically about their own descriptions of the world, the consequences of accepting those descriptions, and how altering those words and metaphors might change the attitudes associated with an object, person, or event. Non-fiction representations of these ideas were formed around a broad aspect of this category taken from their studies of Wittgenstein: “The Limits of Our Language Mean the Limits of Our World.”

Student Poetry

Many of the world’s great artists were inspired by their surroundings. In this project, students bridged the gap between the worlds of the poet and the reader as well as between the worlds of the digital and the physical.

While studying poetry in A.P. Literature, students cooperated in the writing and filming of seven Location Inspired Poems (LIPs), each of a different poetic form: blank verse, sonnet, etc. They selected one poem to memorize and performed it on location. The poems were then combined into a single film, and those films were linked to a quick response (QR) code placed at the location as well as on digital school maps, where they can be scanned by anyone with a mobile device, accessing the poetry where it was composed.

Words

As we search for love and acceptance, the need to stand out increasingly dominates our behavior. In our second unit, students explore the relationship between attraction and beauty from a variety of evolutionary, social, and psychoanalytical perspectives, including the works of Freud and Sartre and the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In this documentary, the entire senior class participated in a solutions-based learning experiment in which they developed hypotheses regarding the causes and effects of beauty, attraction, and the search for acceptance on a high school campus. Inspired by “Beauty Culture” and the Annenberg Space for Photography, this documentary showcases the students’ conclusions.

Consuming Beauty combines ethnography and critical research with photography and candid interviews to explore the search for beauty and the price of becoming beautiful to attract the eyes of others.

The Very Pleasant Bakery

While studying the effects of language on thought, while in Digital Humanities, our students experimented with the language and grammar of film. Inspired by Rene Magritte’s “The Son of Man” “The Treachery of Images,” our student filmmakers explained that they wanted a film about people who don’t accept that they’re in a film meeting an actor in a film, but who doesn’t know she’s in one, at the moment; the main character is the only one who doesn’t know she’s in a film. Therefore, the medium of film becomes analogous to the structure of language. We, the audience, participate in the film, believing the library is on fire because we know the rules of film: special effect fire is real fire. The main character believes it too, reacting appropriately. The other characters, however, are in the film but not of it. They, therefore, react to a character reacting to nothing, as the flames are not actually there.

Self(ie)-Obsessed: Redefining Art in the Age of the Selfie

We live in an age of addictive self-portraiture, increasingly known as the “age of the selfie.” The selfie is a smartphone-produced version of a self-portrait, which has been a staple of art history. Now “selfie” has been declared by Oxford Dictionaries as their “2013 Word of the Year,” and we’ve seen Barack Obama s well as the Pope participating in the photographic craze. American art critic Jerry Saltz has written of the selfie, “It’s something like art. They have a certain intensity, and they’re starting to record that people are the photographers of modern life.” So is the selfie the latest development in the long and fascinating history of self-portraiture that attaches to the rich historical context of art, or is it a vacuous amusement that spawns from technological innovation married by economics to our shallow narcissism? #Self(ie)Obsessed takes a close look at the role of the selfie in or lives, culture, and the Humanities.