Projected Identities

“Projected Identities: A Contemporary Art Education Workshop” is an interdisciplinary graduate course for art educators who wish to explore ways of bringing together traditional art-making processes of drawing and painting with emerging medias of digital and projected imagery. In “Projected Identities,” learners fuse hand art-making processes with digital image manipulations and projected imagery in a series of exploratory artistic self-examinations. The purpose of this approach is to embed layers of autobiographical meaning and image by joining written reflections into a visual manifestation of personal memory and identity.

“Projected Identities” was conceived, developed, and executed by high school students enrolled in Advanced Design at Oak Park High School in Kansas City, Missouri. Since the initial process and performance piece was recorded in 2007, students have continued the course tradition of “taking an artwork, doing something to it … and then doing something else to it” by re-thinking and re-creating “Projected Identities” in a variety of manifestations. In the spring of 2008, the concept re-emerged as a book arts project, with new purposes and new messages.