Kairos and Community Building: Implications for Literacy Researchers
Black-Boxing
the Brand
The billboard will be Artists Now’s most widely visible
message, but it must be situated within a range of messages
that in recent years connect Artists Now with the extraordinary,
right in its home town of Highland Park. This connection has been
an intentional strategy that Artists Now’s founding organizer
has pursued in diverse forums. For
example, Artists Now provides free performances in the Highland
Park public schools where the organizers’ children attend,
a nearby charter school where a friend works, and the public
schools in Philadelphia where the organizer’s former students
teach. In these settings, Artists Now sends flyers home to hundreds
of households connecting Artists Now, great art, and students’ lives.
In addition, Artists Now and the Highland Park
mayor’s
office have co-sponsored events at the community youth and senior
center and for the town’s centennial celebration. Out of
this recent work, Artists Now has been publicized in town newsletters
and flyers, and in the summer of 2006, the local paper ran a
front page human interest story on Artists Now’s founder.
The founder used these
dispersed sites to “brand” Artists
Now. This branding links local
residents with a commitment to the arts and defines Highland
Park as a local community that supports such a project. In
addition to interacting with the schools, the government, and the
media, Artists Now brands its message by working with
the extraordinary institutions in Highland Park. For example,
the following clip of Artists Now founder illustrates
how this branding includes partnering with the local Birnns
Factory to make Artists Now chocolate bars or working with the
high end Centerpiece boutique on Artists Now
"thank you" gifts.
From school flyers to fine chocolate, the organizer black-boxes Artists Now’s message, as the video clip illustrates. This black-boxing naturalizes the billboard’s Artists Now = Highland Park = extraordinary message. Tracing this black-boxing exposes the extended network of texts and contexts that inform the creation of this billboard.
(For more on how “black-boxing” involves dispersed
rhetorical and material activity, see the core,
especially the reference to Bazerman’s (1999) account
of the diverse work that Edison did to bring the electric light
into use. Bazerman calls this work heterogeneous symbolic engineering,
a variation of Law’s heterogeneous engineering, and it
included everything from creating a laboratory to bribing politicians
and buying off journalists.)
