Ioana Literat:
So my name is Ioana Literat, and I'm sitting here with Lalitha Vasudevan as part of the Playing with Form Exhibition, and we're here in front of Lalitha's part of the exhibition, which is titled, beautifully titled Openings. Can you tell us about how this builds on your previous work, and what kind of function did it have in our interdisciplinary group?
Lalitha Vasudevan:
One of the early impactful moments that we had as a group was deciding that we were going to make things, that part of what we were going to do to come together was certainly explore and ask questions, but we just made things from that first day where we crumpled up paper, and we did things. And there was a day where we had organized a play retreat, and I think one of our colleagues, Tran, had come in and walked us through accordion books. And there was something that happened that moment that just suddenly made all of this work I had been doing, looking at the geographies of young people, looking at their media practices, suddenly come to life in a new way where I could feel what it might mean to map things.
And then the piece about actually making the thing was really fun because not only was everybody doing it, everybody was making, everybody was cutting, but there was opportunity to take it in your own direction. And I thought about how play and playing with form in particular opened up my own imagination, but also was a way for me to invite other people. And so thinking about the way that play provided openings for people to deepen their own engagement with existing ideas, but also to consider new ideas. So I think that's where I was thinking about openings.
I think it's such a wonderful thing that the college provides opportunities and invitations for people to have ideas funded. So having that institutional support obviously provided us some amount of funds to do some things, but I think it also put on the administration's radar, hey, this is a thing of value that people are coming together to do. The other thing I would say just about institutional support is having support that exists for which the institution doesn't always know the outcome.
Ioana Literat:
That institutional support is so important symbolically too, for others to see this. And I think this exhibition in itself, making our work more public in a way, opening up, is really important in that sense for our colleagues to see, for students to see that this kind of work is possible and has been meaningful in so many ways.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head there because I think we had put into the proposal from the beginning that this was both an opportunity to go inward and collective, but also to make the work public. We're so trained to have set modes of publication and making work public, and so this was an opportunity, I think, to expand also how we think about making the work accessible to broader people.
Ioana Literat:
And I think a big part of that also is the interdisciplinary aspect. So I'm wondering, you've been a pioneer in interdisciplinary and multimodal work for so long, and I'm wondering if this collaboration made you think differently in some ways about interdisciplinary and/or collaborative work.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
It made me see in a new way how important regular engagement with interlocutors is. I always knew that some stuff you can tinker on your own, but that sustained commitment and just how important it was even when we didn't have a plan to be together, and then to have out of that, come out of that, the play retreats. The ways that people around the college are coming and saying, "Oh, is there another one?" I think we saw that as an opportunity to create a day-long invitation to our faculty colleagues to come and play, but also to use the time to do their own work like we would in a writing retreat. I think where we got to with the first year of those was thinking about the importance of an opening provocation-
Ioana Literat:
Yeah. Opening.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
... and really setting people's stage, setting the stage for people's engagement with one another, especially since sometimes people wouldn't know each other when they came to those. And then having the invitation at the end of the day to gather again, to engage in some form of making, which we've all really seen as important and vital for our own inquiry.
Also, sometimes I think about the work you and I do with the Media and Social Change Lab, and one of the things that somebody said to me was, "Oh my gosh. You all have support for students want to do this." I said, "I would have loved this 20 years ago when I was in my doctoral program." And I think in some ways, I'm involved in, we're involved in trying to create those conditions for the next generation of researchers, of educators. And the other thing I will say that I think I had thought I had done before, but that I'm doing way more is taking a lot of, not taking risks, but playing with forms that I didn't think of playing with. And so that's been fun to really allow that to emerge and-
Ioana Literat:
That definitely resonates with us just how much we've learned from each other in terms of Playing with Form, and how we've been able to encourage each other to be bold. To be honest, that's not something I had experienced before in this kind of setting, and that was really powerful for me.
Lalitha Vasudevan:
Yeah, I agree.