As part of the Integral Cinema Project’s outreach
application process, I recently consulted on a multimedia mental health
intervention project at the University of Chicago and the University of
Illinois at Chicago Schools of Medicine helping them apply an Integral approach
to deepen the power and effect of their intervention. The researchers already
had intuitively fleshed out the need for an intervention that addressed the
intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social dimensions of the issue at hand,
namely helping teens at risk learn to become more resilient in the face of the
often daunting challenges of growing up in today’s fast moving and complicated
world.
To help the research team apply and integrate these four
main intervention dimensions in a more coordinated and effective way I created
an Integrally-Informed Sensory Synchronization Template for the project,
mapping the four intervention dimensions of intentional, behavioral, cultural,
and social across the multimedia expressive dimensions of Text, Image (still
& moving), Sound, Time (accumulated meaning patterns), and Interactivity. This
integration of the intervention and expression dimensions included the mapping
of desired affect patterns and their relationship to expressive modalities
including textual linguistic and mimetic patterns; visual shapes, colors,
tones, framing and space; audio modalities (dialogic, musical, atmospheric,
effectual, etc.); and meaning patterns accumulated over time.
The goal of this approach was to help them coordinate the
intervention across multiple modes of expression and perception to induce what
cinematic theorist Sergei Eisenstein called the synchronization of the senses, the process in which a message,
synchronized across multiple expressive dimensions, achieves the power and
force of actual lived multi-sensory experience. This shift from mere
information sharing to a deeply felt lived-experience has the potential to
induce deep change and transformation across all four dimensions of intention,
behavior, relationship formation, and socialization patterns.
This research is still ongoing but initial results suggest a
great potential for this approach, and its application for use in multimedia
mental health interventions, and other multimedia transformational healing
endeavors, including transformational learning, and individual and collective
human development applications.
Integral CinemaProject Researcher Report
By Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D.
