Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture
346
Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841502267 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 346 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Mel Alexenberg is an artist, educator, writer, and blogger working at the interface between art, science, technology, and culture. His artworks can be seen at www.melalexenberg.com. They explore interrelationships between the post-digital age and Jewish consciousness, space-time systems and electronic technologies, participatory art and community values, responsive art in cyberspace and real space, and blogart and wikiart.
His artworks exploring digital technologies and global systems are in the collections of more than forty museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Jewish Museum in Prague, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Alexenberg was professor at Columbia University, Bar Ilan University, and Ariel University, head of Emunah College School of the Arts in Jerusalem, head of the art department at Pratt Institute, dean of visual arts at New World School of the Arts in Miami, and research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
He is the author of the books: Through a Bible Lens: Bibliical Insights for Smartphone Photography and Socail Media (HarperCollins), Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life, The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect), Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture (Intellect), The Future of Art in a Digital Age (Intellect), Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Four Essays on Judaism and Contemporary Art (in Hebrew), Aesthetic Experience in Creative Process (Bar Ilan University Press), and with Otto Piene, LightsOROT: Spiritual Dimensions of the Electronic Age (MIT and Yeshiva University Museum).
He has contributed chapters to the books: Inter/sections/Inter/actions: Art Education in a Digital Visual Culture, Interdisciplinary Art Education: Building Bridges to Connect Disciplines and Cultures, Semiotics of Visual Culture: Sights, Signs, and Significance, and Community Connections: Intergenerational Links in Art Education, Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric.
Born and educated in New York, Alexenberg earned degrees at Queens College, Yeshiva University, and New York University (interdisciplinary doctorate in art, science, and psychology). He lives with his wife, artist Miriam Benjamin, in Ra'anana, Israel.
Read an Excerpt
Educating Artists for the Future
Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture
By Mel Alexenberg
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2008 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-226-7
CHAPTER 1
Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture
Mel Alexenberg
The genesis of this book was an invitation by the renowned mathematicians Tzvi Arad and Bernard Pinchik to create a new School of Art and Multimedia at Netanya Academic College in Israel. I began to develop a proposal for a school in which students redefine art in creative ways at the interdisciplinary interface where scientific inquiry and new technologies shape aesthetic and cultural values – both local and global. Although I have had years of experience in both science and art education, I knew that I needed to explore fresh directions for educating artists for the future in a rapidly changing world where the boundaries between art, science, technology, and culture are becoming diaphanous. What better way to discern these new directions, I thought, than to invite some of the world's most innovative thinkers in higher education in the arts to advise me. This book is their advice. It not only offers invaluable advice for creating new schools, but it provides alternative paths for upgrading and refreshing existing art schools and university art departments worldwide for a post-digital future.
As I studied the diverse chapters exploring alternative futures for educating artists that I received from artists/researchers/teachers working in Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, India, Israel, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States, I began to search for a conceptual framework for organizing this book. My search was interrupted by a meeting in Holland with Charles Esche, Director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Richard Flood, Chief Curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. We were charged with awarding an artist the coveted Wolf Prize, the equivalent in the arts of the Nobel Prize, from among numerous nominations received from throughout the world. The three of us unanimously agreed to award Michaelangelo Pistoletto the prize because of his inventive career as an artist, educator, and activist, whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that address the major technological and cultural changes of our era. In his hometown, Biella, Italy, he established Cittadellarte as a center to inspire artists to produce responsible change in society through transdisciplinary ideas and creative projects. Pistoletto asserts, "Artists have a unique and totally free way of understanding and analyzing society, and consequently of being engaged with it. Cittadellarte firmly believes that art can interact among all the diverse spheres of human activity that form society, and is thereby a generator for responsible transformation of society."
At Schiphol Airport, waiting for my flight home to Tel Aviv, I was struck by four books sharing the main display rack in the airport bookshop: A Whole New Mind, Intelligence Reframed, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and Machine Beauty. They explore some of the same concepts that I had discussed with Esche and Flood in Eindhoven. Browsing through them gave me further food for thought about how to group the chapters in the book and write the introduction for it. It is significant that none of these books were art books. Glancing at the back covers, I saw that they were classified as books in the areas of business, psychology, current affairs, and computer science. It is apparent that new ways for educating artists for the future will be found in a global fabric woven with colorful threads from all fields of human endeavor. Significant threads are revealed in subtitles of the four books.
The subtitles of A Whole New Mind by business consultant Daniel Pink (2006) are "Why Right-brainers will Rule the Future" and "Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age." Pink proposes that we are witnessing a paradigm shift beyond the digital culture of the Information Age to a Conceptual Age in which people in all walks of life will succeed when they behave like artists who integrate left-brain with right-brain thinking. Industrial Age factory workers and Information Age knowledge workers are being superseded by Conceptual Age creators and empathizers who integrate high-tech abilities with high-touch and high-concept abilities. When the president of General Motors states that he is in the art business selling mobile sculpture that incidentally provides transportation, the M.F.A. degree has become more valuable to corporate recruiters than the M.B.A.
"Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century" is the subtitle of Harvard psychology professor Howard Gardner's book, Intelligence Reframed (1999), that describes how artists have always needed to develop their spatial intelligence. Artists of the future, however, will realize that this pattern-recognition mode of thinking is not enough. Spatial intelligence will have to be combined in multiple configurations with bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, naturalist, intrapersonal, interpersonal, spiritual, and existential intelligences.
The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Friedman (2000) is subtitled "Understanding Globalization." He dramatizes the conflict between manufacturing the luxury car Lexus and attachment to deeply rooted olive trees – the tension between the globalization system and the ancient forces of culture, geography, tradition, and community. His analysis of our global future makes us understand that artists faced with the challenge of finding a healthy balance between preserving a sense of identity and community in an era of globalization will need to learn to create artworks that combine pride in roots with an overview of the world as shared by others.
Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter (1998) subtitled his book, Machine Beauty, "Elegance and the Heart of Technology." Artists educated for the future will need to enter into the heart of the technology they are using to locate its inner beauty as a powerful source for their artistic creativity. Gelernter emphasizes that the scientific and engineering geniuses in the computer field are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty at every level, in the most important interfaces and programming languages and the winning algorithms.
Beyond the Digital
Stephen Wilson's chapter, "Beyond the Digital: Preparing Artists to Work at the Frontiers of Technoculture" sets the tone for the first section of this book and gives it its title. He proposes that although the impact of digital technology is significant, it forms part of something much more momentous that is intertwined with the aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and social-economic. Scientific research and technological development are radically transforming basic philosophical ideas about the nature of the physical world, time and space, the nature of life and intelligence, and the limits in our abilities to transform the world and humanity. Art redefined by a digital revolution linked to revolutions brewing in the realms of biology, neurophysiology, materials science, and cosmology require new methods for educating artists at the intersections of art, science, technology, and culture.
Roy Ascott, in his chapter, "Pixels and Particles: The Path to Syncretism," also proposes that the digital moment has passed in the sense that interfaces are migrating from a cabled, box-bound environment to wireless multi-sensory, multimodal, mobile, wearable forms, and eventually with biochips implanted in our bodies. He coins the word "moistmedia" as the symbiosis between dry pixels and wet biomolecules. Our artistic inquiry and design skills will be devoted to creating moistmedia artworks from which new metaphors, new language, and new methodologies will arise. The dynamic interplay between digital, biological, and cultural systems calls for a syncretic approach to arts education realized through connectivity, immersion, interaction, transformation, and emergence. Ascott explains that young artists face the challenge of creating a syncretic art that explores telematics (planetary connectivity), nanotechnology (bottom-up construction), quantum computing (augmented cyberception), cognitive science and pharmacology (field consciousness), and esoterica (psychic instrumentality).
In "Sustaining Creativity and Losing the Wild," Carol Gigliotti, who teaches media courses as well as environmental ethics for art, design and media students, discusses metaphoric approaches in new media art and design education that envisions natural and human creativity as integrated components in a universal creative process, both of which need to be sustained. She argues that new media art students cannot ignore, for instance, how the mining of coltan in Africa needed in the manufacture of laptop computers wrecks havoc on the environment and creates political conflict and violence. Her chapter explores the deep connections between the suppression and destruction of creativity in natural systems and the corrosive effects of that destruction on sustained human creativity. Gigliotti argues that embedding this kind of information in a digital art curriculum is the key for placing the medium in a critical cultural context, one in which the social and political implications of the digital medium are made transparent. What this means for educating artists for the future is that we learn to avoid contributing to the destruction of our own creativity by our failure to see the connection of that creativity to the natural world.
Mark Amerika in his chapter, "Making Space for the Artist," refers not to the ecological space of the biosphere, but to the space of mind that digital-artists-to-be shape into artistic personas through their own unique creative paths. He tells his students that there is no proper straightforward path for constructing the "right" set of digital personas or sure-fire way for creating their own one-person "art-making machine." Amerika characterizes his own path as being full of aimless drifting, a multi-linear narrative of freeform nomadic excursions. This technomadic journey of writing, performing, hacking, and directing "takes place" in a networked "space of flows" littered with the remains of his collective failures and – much to his total surprise – a few successes. He teaches through example how to enter a space of mind where the artist-as-medium improvisationally composes on and in the open playing fields of potential artistic development, while pointing to the radical, intersubjective experiences we are always filtering, tracing, remixing, and otherwise conjuring into multiple and hybridized works of art when tapping into our unconscious potential. His students learn what it takes to participate in a highly technologized, social process of self-motivated personal discovery, social networking, and artistic invention, so that they can step into the fold and "play themselves" – even if that means having to reinvent their artistic personas over and over again.
Networked Times
Robert W. Sweeny's chapter, "Unthinkable Complexity: Art Education in Networked Times," explores the challenges and possibilities for educating artists in a network society, looking to connections between multidisciplinary complexity theory, art theory fusing physical and virtual space, and educational theory that was put into practice in open classrooms a half-century ago. Sweeny proposes a form of networked pedagogy that is informed by and responsive to complex networks of unthinkable complexity. Teaching in the network society, through hybrid networks consisting of traditional physical spaces and cyberspaces, offers art educators opportunities to address the potential for complex networks in the service of developing new forms of pedagogy and art. Based upon complexity theory, characteristics of both networked art and learning are: differentiation, interaction, self-organization, and emergence. As differentiated networks and artworks interact, self-organize, and emerge, educators have the opportunity to think the unthinkable, working the 'net through educational practices that are creative, critical, and complex. The structure of the Internet, composed of research tools, interactive social space, communication channel, and art gallery, parallels the structure of open classrooms in which students gained access to a variety of forms of information and took part in social exchanges. The open classroom in networked times offers an educational model for educating artists in a hybrid environment of real and virtual spaces.
In his chapter, "Art/Science and Education," Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss focuses on how cultural, intellectual, and spiritual fields are prerequisite to evolutions in art, science, and technology. He identifies the main question for educating artists in a digital network culture as how the increased recognition of interconnections in differing fields of knowledge, systems, and ecology theories is perceived in light of learning tasks. Chaos theory and self-organization and social network theories suggest that we acquire learning competences from forming connections between disparate ideas and fields in which links between them represent survival in an interconnected world. Amplification of learning, knowledge, and understanding through the extension of a personal network into a global network is the epitome of a new learning culture. The task of tomorrow's artist is that of an intermediary, a catalyst between diverse fields of knowledge, ways of thinking, social models, and solution strategies based upon cooperation, communication, and interaction. Digital network culture not only changes modes of media production and distribution, but it transforms art from object making to art as processes of creating "immaterial" rhizome-like structures of remotely connected individuals in online communities. "Print and radio tell; stage and film show; cyberspace embodies."
Sonvilla-Weiss suggests that pedagogical strategies to encourage more student-centered, self-regulated, participative and active learning include learning modules that are more responsive to change than full courses, projects that emphasize explorative learning and research-based design, and internships in diverse scientific, economic, artistic, public, and administrative fields. In addition, he develops a curricular topography addressing three realms of learning: 1) sensual, mental, and reflexive media perception and usage; 2) spatio-temporal perception and contextualization in creative processes; and 3) contextualization of forms of knowledge and design.
Ron Burnett argues in his chapter, "Learning, Education and the Arts in a Digital World," that digital networks of communication and the speed with which artists and designers have made use of these networks has led to a broadening of all fields that make it necessary for art and design schools and departments to radically alter not only their practices, but also their disciplinary structures. The institutional infrastructure upon which so much education in art and design has depended – discipline-specific departments, specialized educational models, classroom lectures, studios as sites of teaching and practice, learning as training and vice versa, no longer operate with the same authority for students who do schoolwork and create music on computers, chat, surf, and post their videos on the Internet, use iPods, take photos with cell phones, and create their own blogs. Art students need to be challenged to understand the impact of these activities on themselves and on society and analyze whether they open up critical discourses or shut down serious thinking. There is no question that the depth of involvement and commitment of students to these media have changed them and their views of the world. It is, however, essential that learning about these phenomena is framed by a self-reflexive understanding of their structure, function, and role as tools of communication and interaction. Digital technologies can be change agents when they encourage new kinds of interdisciplinary learning that provide students with tools to evaluate alternative ideas, practices, and vantage points and create revolutionary ways of seeing beyond works of art to seeing the world that surrounds and enframes them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Educating Artists for the Future by Mel Alexenberg. Copyright © 2008 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Education for a Conceptual Age,Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture Mel Alexenberg,
Beyond the Digital,
Beyond the Digital: Preparing Artists to Work at the Frontiers of Technoculture Stephen Wilson,
Pixels and Particles: The Path to Syncretism Roy Ascott,
Sustaining Creativity and Losing the Wild Carol Gigliotti,
Making Space for the Artist Mark Amerika,
Networked Times,
Unthinkable Complexity: Art Education in Networked Times Robert Sweeny,
Art/Science & Education Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss,
Learning, Education, and the Arts in a Digital World Ron Burnett,
Afference and Efference: Encouraging Social Impact through Art and Science Education Jill Scott,
Polycultural Perspectives,
Expressing with Grey Cells: Indian Perspectives on New Media Arts Vinod Vidwans,
New Media Art as Embodiment of Tao Wengao Huang,
Between Hyper-Images and Aniconism: New Perspectives on Islamic Art in the Education of Artists Ismail Ozgur Soganci,
Touching Light: Post-Traditional Immersion in Interactive Artistic Environments Diane Gromala,
Art and the Myth of Transparency (MIT Press 2005) and Jinsil Seo,
Reflective Inquiry,
Media Golem: Between Prague and ZKM Michael Bielicky,
Life Transformation – Art Mutation Eduardo Kac,
Learning Through the Re-embodiment of the Digital Self Yacov Sharir,
My Journey: From Physics to Graphic Design to User-Interface/Information-Visualization Design Aaron Marcus,
Emergent Praxis,
Entwined Histories: Reflections on Teaching Art, Science, and Technological Media Edward A. Shanken,
A Generative Emergent Approach to Graduate Education Bill Seaman,
Media Literacy: Reading and Writing Images in a Digital Age Shlomo Lee Abrahmov,
The Creative Spirit in the Age of Digital Technologies: Seven Tactical Exercises Lucia Leao,
Epilogue: Realms of Learning,
From Awesome Immersion to Holistic Integration Mel Alexenberg,
About the Authors,