Digital Visual Culture

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

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!

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/ 

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?

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