The idea of Spritivity.
Spritivity is a creative communication process developed developed as a joint effort by Zenzone Media Arts Lab of the China Culture Administration Society (ZML) and the London Multimedia Lab for Audio-visual Composition and Communication at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LML). It enables rich communication between groups of participants of all kinds (students , community members, researchers, business partners), working together to explain, share and explore in rich audiovisual language how they understand and can animate both the real and the potential worlds they inhabit.
Spritivity, as a communication medium, relies on developing a picture language for making and exchanging stories. It is particularly significant in situations where the various groups of participants do not share a common written and spoken language.
The key characters, or elements in the stories are sprites which participants may construct for themselves as puppets they can animate, masks they can wear , graphic images on paper with adhesive backing that they can stick on pages in story books, and so on. Sprites can be created from scratch, using a variety of materials, or they can be extracted from audio visual media, including photographs taken by the participants themselves.
Each sprite is grounded in a particular context (both real and imagined) of specific interest to the person who creates it. A sprite gains its identity through its creator's imagination in terms of where and how that sprite might live in that context. It gains specific characteristics - initially specified by the person who extracted/created the sprite - that can be extended by other participants. These characteristics indicate the kind of character that the sprite can play in a story - often voyaging far beyond the context where it originated. they inform how it will think and behave in the context of an audiovisual production such as a picture-book, movie, shadow-puppet perfomance, or whatever.
Particpants in spritivity workshops can work together to create a story where the sprites that they, collectively, have created are the main players, mise-en-scene according to the context of the story, and its development
You can explore here how this worked for English and Chinese students at primary school level
It is possible to ground sprites in an abstract concept like "symmetry" in mathematics, or the "golden ratio" in architectural design. The set of real and imagined contexts in which participants in a spritivity workshop ground their sprites are then particular instantiations of this abstract concept in the world that the workshop participants inhabit. They can be represented graphically, through photographs, illustrations or maps made by the participants, as can the sprites that they create within them.
Sprites can also be grounded in ideas located in workshop participants' minds.
You can explore here how students at the London School of Economics, constructed personal labyrinths to provide these groundings
The audiovisual power of Spritivity in communicating across languages and cultures
Liu Yang of Zenzone Media Arts Lab, says, in the Spritivity workshop guide written for participating students in English primary schools:
"Talking about a sprite, we may think of Monkey King or Harry Potter. Sprites in those fairy tales they have good habits and bad habits. Those sprites are mostly created from real things. Authors combined the characteristics of the objects and their creativity. That's the way how these sprites are born. Have you ever imagined that we can create our own sprites? We can have our own legend of sprites!
The goal of spritivity is to activate your creativity. You can create your sprite and introduce it to us. We will introduce you and the story of your sprite to the Chinese children. Later, your sprites will appear in stories made by Chinese children. Then we will introduce to you the sprites made by the Chinese Children who read your stories."
Neither the English students nor the Chinese students who participated in the workshops and projects shown on this website could join in the traditional way of exchanging stories: telling or writing them to each other, because they speak and write in different languages. Translation is always necessary between English and Chinese written stories and vice versa. But Chinese students, like English students, can draw, or make animated reprsentations (picture stickers, shadow puppets, marionettes, etc) of their sprites and perform, and here no translation is necessary.
Through exploring the spritivity workshops on this website, you can see how the Chinese students could build on the English students' sprite legends through their drawings and visual perfomances, and take those legends into new and fascinating territories for the English students to explore further.