WhoWeAm

WhoWeAm is an expedition to discover "who we are" as individuals and as the collection of cultures that make our city, region and country. Even from a global perspective, what happens in the U.S. is often all too relevant. The impetus for WhoWeAm is a cluster of ideas that lie at the intersection of the social, life and cognitive sciences, and of history and art. Chief among them is psychologist Albert Bandura's notion that what we do is strongly influenced by a negotiation between our own beliefs and attitudes and those we pick up from our environment. Though well established for decades, the implications of this idea have yet to emerge in our civilization. What would it mean to realize that the messages we send ourselves through environment we create with our media, buildings and visual culture may determine our circumstances? What is the impact of culture on education, crime, or poverty? What if rather than our notions about individual issues, we are guided by a larger web of ideas—a tangle of stories, interwoven with our biology but hidden beneath the surface of our daily lives?

The WhoWeAm project springs from nearly two decades of working on experimental media art in which I have sought to find new and effective ways to give cultural resonance to knowledge that seems important. I have come to realize that the link between art and our culture can be much more profound than it is, and that this may be a key to finally making progress on vexing challenges we face and on better realizing our potential. At this stage, these ideas may seem general and vague. These vlogs are intended to bring them into focus, and that will be the fun of it.

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