Educating Artists For the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture

by Mel Alexenberg, Editor
Intellect Books, Bristol, UK, 2008
343 pp., illus. 10 b/w. Trade, $60.00
ISBN: 978-1-84150-191-8.

Reviewed by Jack Ox
ARTS Lab
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico

jackox@hpc.unm.edu


Today’s practitioners of the art/science culture, employing the newest technologies as either creators or early adaptors are most often found in university environments. In the past, when the arts were more involved with the person, the body, the paint brush as an extension of the artist, dance in one, local environment, theatre performed in a theatre, successful artists were frequently living and working in urban/cultural environments outside of academia. In fact, freedom from an academic schedule meant that an artist could travel at will, performing, exhibiting, and building a different sort of community than you find in the university. As we move into big ideas involving interdisciplinary collaborations with hugely expensive technology, artists are forced to inhabit research institutions.

By its very nature, the university is a container of diverse specializations. It is the place where one can work with biologists, linguists, mathematicians, and artists. It is a place to train younger people into different ways of thinking and simultaneously create new collaborators. The university also collects new and interesting technologies for use in research. So the artist is now part of a different kind of community. However, because their practices are so new, there is no established path of pedagogy to follow.

This book is an anthology of very creative people taking their work out of itself and into a more general level of being. Many problems occur in this journey; i.e. there is no history of this practice covered by art history faculties. Edward A. Shanken writes about the “entwined histories of art, science, and technological media, which have to be taught along with practice because of the lack of a formal history. Stephen Wilson teaches this history beginning with the “Bauhaus” which developed a pedagogic methodology that is still relevant and useful today if one removes the utilitarian aspects. He talks about Sonia Sheridan who pioneered teaching process and generative systems in the 1970’s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Moving along historically Wilson describes early training in the conceptual arts and finishes with Conceptual/Information Arts (CIA) a later stage of development. CIA attempts to teach basic scientific research methods to art students.

Other difficulties include starting from scratch in deciding what and how to teach. Development of a theory of metaphor becomes essential as artists explore interdisciplinary mapping, sometimes referred to as “intermedia” (Dick Higgins 1966) or “bisociation” (Koestler 1964). Carol Gigliotti uses metaphor in all of its forms as a basis for her thinking in educating digital artists. Metaphor includes many different kinds of perception and is the ground for mapping one information system onto another. I cannot imagine teaching interdisciplinary studies without exploring how this mapping occurs.

Art education that utilizes all of the various networking possibilities in major universities has opened up. I was disappointed that Internet2 and most recently, the National LambdaRail are completely missing from any of the networking sections. Classes are being taught in Second Life by Louisiana State University in collaboration with the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There have also been many AccessGrid experiments with collaborative teaching techniques. I think that these developments should at least be put in edition two. The sort of networking written about by Robert Sweeny is complexity theory and how intertwining lines of information form emergent material, as a kind of metaphor for networking. Ron Burnett writes about a philosophy of education that eschews the previous manner of working where a product is the point of art making activities. Digital/interdisciplinary/networked works are process oriented and will completely change pedagogical thinking.

There is more: Roy Ascott, Bill Seaman, Shlomo Lee Abrahmove, Lucia Leao, Jill Scott, Eduardo Kac, Yacov Sharir, Mark America, Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, Vinod Vidwans, Wengao Huang, Michael Bielicky, Ismail Ozgur Soganci, Diane Gromala, Jinsil Seo, and Aaron Marcus all try to take from their original works new ways to create new pedagogy. One interesting comment by Burnett really caught my attention: He points out that interdisciplinary practice might run into problems as the boundaries between different media dissolves. I wonder about that, and I am waiting for volume two of this book, knowing that there is much more out there that is worth considering when constructing new educational platforms.