Digital Visual Culture

Announcing the publication of Inter/Actions/Inter/Sections: Art Education in a Digital Visual Culture!

It is my great pleasure to announce the publication of Inter/Actions/Inter/Sections: Art Education in a Digital Visual Culture (NAEA Press). This anthology features twenty-two chapters from some of the most prominent art educators, theorists, and artists in the field.

From the back cover:

"Opens up a new conversation about the technological possibilities of contemporary art education. Authors cover topics representing research projects as well as theoretical and practical issues of digital visual culture, including those connected to identity, social interaction, cultural conditions, literacy, and learning. Teachers at all levels will help to prepare their students for the future by addressing the issues raised in this text.”

—Kerry Freedman, Professor and Head of Art Education, Northern Illinois University

The book can be purchased from the NAEA website, at the following page: http://tinyurl.com/4fuyww2. In addition, NAEA Press will be hosting an book signing at the upcoming NAEA Annual Conference. The signing will be held at 3:00 on Saturday, March 19, in the NAEA Press Bookshop. See www.arteducators.org for more information about the conference.

You should also check this blog for periodic updates, including post by anthology authors and conversations regarding the anthology themes. You can also sign up for the site RSS feed by clicking the appropriate button located to the right of this text field.

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to all authors involved in this project, and those involved in the publication process, especially Lynn Ezell. Here's to continuing the research explorations, critical interrogations, and digital conversations!

Dr. Carleton Palmer named Director of Visual Art at IMPACT, NYU

Dr. Carleton Palmer, contributor to Inter/Actions/Inter/Sections, has been named Director of Visual Art for the IMPACT (Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology) Program at NYU this summer. http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/music/summer/impact/

 

IMPACT explores interactions of music, dance and theater, video and visual art with and through technology. IMPACTORS recently participated in an Internet2 event titled “Triangulation” connecting Italy, the “Black Box” theater in NY, and Steinhardt’s Dolan Studio in real time performances. http://www.isalta.com//IMPACT/Triangulation/triangleprogalt.htm

An Interactive Exhibit for About $30

A recent article from the New York Times dealing with digital visual culture:

NY Times: Museums Special Section
An Interactive Exhibit for About $30
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/arduinos-provide-interactive-exhibits-for-about-30.html?ref=design

TorahTweets4M&M@52

Artists Mel [Alexenberg] and Miriam [Benjamin] are celebrating their 52nd year of marriage by collaborating on this blogart project. They were married motzei Simhat Torah, the Jewish holiday when the torah scroll is rewound to begin the annual cycle of reading it. During each of the 52 weeks of their 52nd year, they will post six photographs reflecting their life together with torah tweet captions that relate the weekly torah reading to their lives, past and present.

http://torahtweets.blogspot.com/ 

IMPACT (Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology) at NYU

As author of Chapter 11 of Robert Sweeny’s Digital Visual Culture: Intersections and Interactions in 21st Century Art Education, NAEA, (National Art Education Association – still in press), I have developed a page supplementary to “A Digital Visual Culture Course for Incarcerated Youth” with student multimedia portfolios, documentation and relevant instructional materials:

http://isalta.com/Incarceranimation.html

The occasion for creating this page was the opportunity to interview for the position of Visual Arts Director for the NYU “IMPACT” program, whose acronym comes from Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology. It is a program that should be of interest to people interested in the book and this blog.



IMACT has produced a set of significant summer art workshop programs for the past five years in New York and in Korea that is a model for flexible yet disciplined inquiry into artistic collaborations including digital technologies. Composers and musicians have created distance works, and visual artists have responded in real-time to performances such as dance.



Dr. John Gilbert, Director of Steinhardt Music Education at NY&U, and the IMPACT project’s director maintains an exemplary blog of his own:

http://wyzardways.blogspot.com/2010/08/impact-2010-rhythm-of-chaos.html

http://wyzardways.blogspot.com/2010/08/impact-2010-rhythm-of-chaos-explores.html

The IMPACT 2010 preview is explanatory, while IMPACT Administrative Coordinator Julie Song’s Facebook effort hosts images, videos and in-process material for the Project:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=113675845347769

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/ac1780/IMPACT_booklet_preview_2010.pdf

IMPACT’s activities are explorations of the new possibilities for art collaboration within the digital culture, and I recommend those of us interested in such developments to keep watching this exciting project.



Dr. Carleton Palmer

Conversations with Myself

As I was driving to my university for the first day of classes, I turned on a local college radio station to hear a track from Bill Evans' "Conversations with Myself" playing. I immediately recognized the song; Evans' technical prowess is as easily identifyable as the sound of multiple piano tracks weaving around one another. He is essentially accompanying himself though the process of overdubbing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversations_with_Myself

The album was recorded in 1963, and was immediately critically received, winning a Grammy that same year. It was also considered controversial, as Evans was relying upon recording technology to create a finished product that ran counter to many concepts of how jazz should be produced: spontaneity, not studio trickery; collaboration, not solipsism. In short, organic, not machinic.

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=2440

Sound familiar? Anyone who has been involved with digital technology and art education is sure to recognize this familiar refrain. Computers are cold, inert machines, incapable of breathing life into digital artforms. While I do not wish to stir this particular hornets nest, I do think that art educators would be well served by looking at how other artforms have incorporated, resisted, or otherwise hybridized developing technologies.

Evans took many assumptions regarding the playing and recording of jazz and turned them on their head. Where he internalized many of the collaborative qualities of jazz musicianship, art students might learn much from the opposite: taking what is in many cases an individual creative act and making it communal, improvisational, and spontaneous.

Communication is shifting as a result of social media; art educators may learn much by studying the dynamic qualities of these technologies and applying them in the classroom, the museum, the community center, places where 'conversations with myself' are all too common.

New Year, (New) New Media

As we transition into a new decade, I am wondering what new sociocultural shifts will accompany technologies not yet on the horizon. In the past ten years, we have seen the rise of social media in the form of wikis, blogs, and MMORPG. The use of social media in everyday life has prompted many in academia to respond through augmented forms of writing, making, and teaching.

Perhaps the shifts are to be subtle, as seen in the recent announcement of the iPad: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/ipad/

Perhaps they are to be socially oriented, as seen in the effectiveness of text message donations for Haiti relief: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1517056920100115

Or, perhaps, they are beyond prediction, though I would hesitate to follow this line of thinking, as it removes the individual user from the equation. As social media has proven, digital technologies thrive when they are accessible, easily modified, and serve a basic use function.

But they have to be used.

Which brings me to this forum; it provides a potential locus for information, conversation, and interaction, but only if used. Dormant, it only has the sheen of the new. My personal goal in this new decade is to use, responsibly and actively, that which I am privileged to access. What are your goals for the new decade, the new year, the new new media?

Digital Publications

Digital technologies are shifting many academic traditions, some of which are centuries old. The possibilities for digital publications are currently being explored by numerous academic journals in the field of Art Education, raising numerous issues regarding participation and access, the enviromental impact of traditional publishing, and the economic realities of our current age.

The most recent issue of Visual Arts Research (University of Illinois Press) has been released in a free online format:

http://var.press.illinois.edu/

Edited by Elizabeth Delacruz, this issue addresses numerous revalent issues in art education. Perhaps most interesting is the first article: Learning From Comics on the Wall: The Old New Media of Sequential Art in
Museology and Multimodal Education, by Damian Duffy. In addressing the 'old, new media,' Duffy presents his research as graphic novel, speaking to media forms through media forms.

This form of remediation, as Bolter and Gruisin remind us, is present in all developing media forms. As scholarship accomodates digital media, it is important for art educators to consider earlier media forms while taking on new ways to visualize research practices.

Digital Media and Learning

Many of you may be aware of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, which has for the past two years provided research grant money for projects dealing with digital media in educational settings.

A number of the chapters in Digital Visual Culture deal with topics that are closely tied to grant projects funded by the DML Initiative: for example, Marissa McClure's  Digital Visual Childhood: Preschoolers and the New Narratives of Digital Video in the Blogosphere ; David Darts (et al), New Media Arts Education: How Community-based Programs can Reshape Teaching and Learning in the Age of Web 2.0 ;  Melanie L. Buffington (et al), Web 2.0, Classrooms, and Digital Visual Culture.

What role do art educators play in the Digital Media and Learning Initiative? What are the possibilities for art educators to attract funding sources of this type? Do the projects represented acknowledge the unique qualities of digital visual culture, and if so, what might art educators learn from these forms of representation?

The critical challenge is to know the mask(s) you wear and why you wear it.

"Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem."  W. Somerset Maugham

A friend writes to me after reading a draft of my chapter in Bob's book: "There's another story connected to either Maughm or Hardy, I always forget which. They're both from the quaint West country. The author was writing something, and went to the Oxford English Dictionary to check on whether he had just written an actual word, or something of his own invention. He found it, but the only usage example was attributed to himself."

When I did a quick wiki search of W. Somerset Maugham, I found this info that adds another way to think about W. Sommerset. "Maugham's mother Edith Mary (née Snell) was consumptive, a condition for which the English doctors of the time prescribed childbirth."   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Somerset_Maugham

So, W. Somerset Maugham was within Mrs. Somerset in an attempt to cure her of consumptive condition. I can see from his life story that he performed masquerades as medical student, perhaps as hetero at times, and probably many other masks.

My friend also writes in response to my chapter: "Anyway, I was intrigued by the strategies for opposing socially-imposed identities. I think I may have been more successful than you in one respect, though. I've actually "passed" as "female" on a few occasions. I don't think you could do so as "unattractive," at least in person as opposed to a cyber-persona.

From the chapter: "Masquerading typically derives from desire for a power not possessed. Gender forms the “co-ordinates” that guide social interaction." My friend comments that "this has an ironic meaning when seen in the light of transvestism. Male-to-female transvestism often causes acute social discomfort, while female-to-male transvestism has become so commonplace as to no longer even has much meaning as a term. I think this has to do with the perceived inequality of power between the genders. A similar discomfort attaches to "blackface" performance, which is literally "denigrating" the performer. Non-whites "acting white" however, or in keeping with Euro-American norms, is commonplace and accepted."

From my chapter: "I have learned about myself by not being me." My friend comments that "This is a good way of stating the lesson learned by Dustin Hoffman's character in "Tootsie," when he comes to understand his own male-chauvinist persona by experiencing the world in a female modality."

And my friend reminds me of the purposeful disguise of gender as a frequent device in opera, but only in "trouser roles" in which female singer/actors portray males, usually youths.

Welcome to Digital Visual Culture

This blog has been established to counterpart with the upcoming NAEA publication Digital Visual Culture: Interactions and Intersections in 21st Century Art Education. This anthology features 23 authors who each deal with a unique facet of digital visuality. Each author will use this blog to expand the research discussed in the text, and to initiate dialogue with a wider audience.

As you can see from the chapter listing below, the text covers a wide range of topics and theories. I hope that you will use this forum to raise questions and push the exploration and interrogation of these developing ideas. Here's to the interactions (and intersections) to come!

PREFACE - Charles. A. Garioan: Critical Agency: Wired, Jacked, Plugged-In

INTRODUCTION - Robert W. Sweeny: I Love Technology, Always and Forever

MEDIA FORMS

Chapter One - David V. Gill: Vertex Mode: Situated Use of 3-D Modeling and Animation Software

Chapter Two - Mara Jevera Fulmer, James W. Shurter: Graphic Tips for Students: Thinking Big, Creating Small – Podcasts for Graphic Design

Chapter Three - Marissa McClure: Digital Visual Childhood: Preschoolers and the New Narratives of Digital Video in the Blogosphere

Chapter Four - Selin Ozguzer: Educational Applications of Flash in Graphic Design Education

Chapter Five -Ryan Shin: Four Digital Media Art Practices: Moving Beyond Drawing and Painting on the Computer

Chapter Six - Michelle Tillander: Digital Visual Culture: The Paradox of the (In)visible

METHODOLOGIES

Chapter Seven - Sheng Kuan Chung: Cybermedia Literacy Art Education

Chapter Eight - Kristin G. Congdon, Doug Blandy: Developing ChinaVine.org: Educating Inside and Outside the Site

Chapter Nine - David Darts, Juan Carlos Castro, Anna Sinner, Kit Grauer: New Media Arts Education: How Community-based Programs can Reshape Teaching and Learning in the Age of Web 2.0

Chapter Ten - Nicholas Hostert: Uncommon Dialogue: Digital Critique Beyond the Art Classroom

Chapter Eleven - Carleton Palmer: A Digital Visual Culture Course for Incarcerated Youth

PRIOR PRACTICES

Chapter Twelve - Mel Alexenberg: Space-Time Structures of Digital Visual Culture: Paradigm Shift from Hellenistic to Hebraic Roots of Western Civilization

Chapter Thirteen - Lián Amaris: Cut and Paste: How the Historical Avant-Garde Foretold Online Identity Construction

Chapter Fourteen - Kevin Tavin: From Storyspace to PowerPoint: Searching for an (In)Adequate Space to Make a Point

Chapter Fifteen - Shei-Chau Wang: Digital Journals: The Past, Present, and Future of Electronic Portfolios for Visual Culture Learners

Chapter Sixteen - Sara Wilson McKay: Creative Commons? Addressing the Threat of Copyright Laws in Art Education

POTENTIALITIES

Chapter Seventeen - Melanie L. Buffington with Kathryn R. Helms, Jan A. Johnston, Sohhyoun Yoon: Web 2.0, Classrooms, and Digital Visual Culture

Chapter Eighteen - Karen Keifer-Boyd: Masquerading the Immateriality of Materiality

Chapter Nineteen - Christine L. Liao: Avatar as Pedagogy

Chapter Twenty - Ryan Patton, Matt Kenyon: Physical Computing and Video Game Art Education

Chapter Twenty One - Mary Stokrocki, Sandra Andrews: Empowering the Disenfranchised: Explorations in Building Sites and Futures in Second Life

Chapter Twenty Two - Pamela Taylor, Christine Ballengee-Morris, B. Steven Carpenter II: Digital Visual Culture, Social Networking, and Virtual Worlds