Tagging as Teaching?

I have spent a week trying to wrap my head around several conversations. On leap day I met with my fellow blogger/artist/teacher/researcher and our professor to discuss our progress. I have been writing in a meandering fashion trying to reflect on many things that I encounter and relate to my learning and teaching. I felt that the tangential posts I was developing were logical until I had the blog opened up on a projector screen. Suddenly I had this sinking feeling that what may to me seem a cohesive process of connecting the dots (or aiding a growing rhizome) may just be a big mess to everyone else. So, I don't think that's how arts based research is supposed to go (?).
I am currently trying to contemplate how I can explain the photography I have been doing for a few years. I know how it is integral to my thinking and my teaching... but how can I tell you?
I have this funny vertical gallery that I add a few pictures from each photo shoot on the right hand side of this page. What questions do these images raise, if any? I think about how this blog could be speaking to people I'll never meet in person. I wonder if they wonder what kind of artist/teacher/researcher I am. I do.
The tags meet me, but I've never seen a writer in the process of tagging.
I wonder who they are.
I recognize some writers' pieces and tags as familiar. I know their unique style.
I have no way to reply to their pieces, so I photograph them.
I wonder where my students will go when they leave my classroom. Will their unique style reflect their experiences with me?
I keep thinking of those six degrees.

Tagging the metaphor

So if creative processes are my way of making sense of the world, tagging is my metaphor.

Much of my artistic process has been a thinly veiled attempt to get outdoors and get myself off the computer or get my nose out of a book. I crave adventure, even if it's the small scale variety. Also, I find myself drawn to graffiti. The fascination began when I taught public school and my students and I explored the history and techniques involved with graffiti.

Here's a bit of that history.
Tags, in graffiti writing, are a fairly recent development. A "tag" is the most basic writing of an artist's name in either spray paint, marker, or other often permanent writing/painting tool. A graffiti writer's tag is his or her personalized signature. "Tagging" is often the example given when opponents of graffiti refer to vandalism; the term used to label all acts of graffiti writing (it is by far the most common form of graffiti). Graffiti often has a reputation as being a visible act of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990's a growing number of artists are switching to temporary paints for a variety of reasons, primarily because is it difficult for the police to apprehend and for the courts to sentence or even convict a person for a protest that is as fleeting and less intrusive than marching in the streets. In some communities, such impermanent works survive longer than works created with permanent paints because the community views the work in the same vein as that of the civil protestor who marches in the street. Protests are finite actions in their duration, but they can have lasting impressions on the "powers that be". In some areas where a number of artist share the impermance ideal, there grows an informal competition. That is, the length of time that a work escapes destruction is related to the amount of respect the work garners in the community. (A crude work that deserves little respect would likely be removed immediately.) The most talented artist might have works last for days.
Artists whose primary object is to assert contol over property and not primarily to create of an expressive work of art (political or otherwise) resist switching to impermanent paints.

These are but a few of the considerations I weighed when I chose the "tag" as my metaphor for artistic and intellectual discovery. Beyond the confines of graffiti, the tag is known as a signification of ownership in many forms. Take for instance, the metadata tag.

We tag web objects to create order, to leave our mark or two cents worth of input to the great information collective. A tag is a keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.
Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by item author/creator or by its consumer/viewers/community. Tags are typically used for resources such as computer files, web pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks. For this reason, "tagging" has become associated with the Web 2.0 buzz. Many people associate "tagging" with the idea of the semantic web, however some believe that tagging may not be having a positive effect on the overall drive towards the semantic web. Tag classification, and the concept of connecting sets of tags between web/blog servers, has led to the rise of folksonomy classification over the Internet, the concept of social bookmarking, and other forms of social software. Larger-scale folksonomies tend to address some of the problems of tagging, as astute users of tagging systems will monitor/search the current use of "tag terms" within these systems, and tend to use existing tags in order to easily form connections to related items. In this way, evolving folksonomies define a set of tagging conventions through eventual group consensus, rather than by use of a formalized standard.
Although "tagging" is often promoted as an alternative to organization by a hierarchy of categories, more and more online resources seem to use a hybrid system, where items are organized into broad categories, with finer classification distinctions being made by the use of tags.

Tag is not just the graffiti writer's signature.
It's not just the data you attach to web objects.
It was my favorite game.
It's attached to the inside of my clothing to tell me who the maker was and the outside of my groceries to tell me how much my food will cost.
There are many parts of my life that are tagged.
I can mark my history with the changing meaning of the term.
I photograph tags as a way to illustrate my own personal changes. I can see myself reflected in their chronological evolution. I can hear myself speaking with their words. I can feel myself glow in their colors.
It excites me. The photography is like a game. Sometimes I loose and I get kicked out of the yard.
Sometimes I win and I come home with a cache of images.
I love it when I win.
Tag,
you're it!

So about that eagle...

I always wanted to go to UNT. My dad was completing his doctoral work at UNT when I was born. I used to ride in a basket on the back of his bike when we would go to the library so he could do research. He and my big sister and brother and my mom would go listen to live jazz at UNT all the time. The eagle was an important icon from my early childhood. We moved when I was four and I told my playmates at the daycare my mom ran out of our house that I would come back to UNT for college. I didn't make it back for my undergraduate degree, but I did finally achieve my goal. That eagle was something to strive for all those years. It represented the education I felt was key to my success. I also think of my dad when I see the eagle. He was a historian, and an expert in native culture. There's more, too....

I think about how perceptive people are described as having the "eagle eye". I will continue to add to this post, I think.