Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.7.11 | Bus riders in Los Angeles County will soon have the opportunity to see how young people view their communities by watching videos of life outside the windows of the buses.

The Out the Window  project includes videos by 75 high school students who worked with artist teachers at Echo Park Film Center and with Public Matters at East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy and Pilipino Workers’ Center. The project is coordinated by Freewaves under the technical direction of UCLA REMAP.

A winner in the HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition, Out the Window was designed to increase young people’s digital media skills and, in an age of declining public media, bring community-specific art to public transit riders.

Students wrote and produced one- to three-minute videos exploring aspects of community and place. Beginning next week, the videos will be shown on more than 2,200 L.A. Metro buses traversing over 4,000 square miles of Los Angeles County.

“Place is the new identity politics,” Anne Bray, executive director of Freewaves, said on the project’s web site, adding that the project creates opportunity for youth to examine place in dialogue with bus riders.

As part of her initial research for the project, Bray surveyed metro riders and found that the vast majority of respondents appreciate art. Though 33 percent have no or limited access to the internet, most riders have cell phones, which they use to text as well as call. Bus riders will be able to reply via text message to questions posed in the videos.

The project aims to link the physical and virtual worlds by showing bus riders digital portraits celebrating the diverse people and neighborhoods in Los Angeles County.

The videos include a “24-hour cinematic celebration” of everyday life; a series called Have You Noticed? / Té Has Fijado? that explores issues around access to healthy food; stories of life in L.A.’s Filipinotown; and students’ own personal stories of immigration and migration.

If you don’t live in Los Angeles, don’t worry. Video will be archived on the project’s website, and we’ll be featuring the students’ video work regularly on Spotlight. Stay tuned.