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New Media Art Education & Research 3: Always Already New
Thinking Media, Subversing Feeling, Scaffolding Knowledge: Art and Education in the Praxis of Transformation
curated by Francesco Monico
Schedule
(draft 11th Dec. 2010)
| Thursday, 16th Dec. 2010 | |||
| FRAMEWORK | |||
| 9.00 | Welcome | ||
| 9.30 | Introduction | Francesco Monico | Planetary Collegium M-Node |
| 9.50 | Keynote | Stephen Kovats | (Don't) Think! Just Do! |
| Kicking off a broad ranging conference on the art of creativity in the digital age, we have to ask ourselves about where we position the form of art we are engaged in. Media and digital arts have often been there to push the limits of our technological environment, and use the material found on these fringes to feed creative self-determination, opening doors not only to new forms of expression, but allow such expression to emerge from contexts where it may be have been restricted or negated. Was Duchamp a media artist? Was Corbusier's rhetoric a technological critique of a society undergoing massive transformation? To push art to the edge, is to move beyond utopia and into the realm of action. Does this mean a radicalization of art, or the need to place creative expression 'above the fray'? Particularly today, as we face the scenarios of irrational restrictions and the threats of self-censorship on net-based expression spilling out of the WikiLeak debacle, asserting that the 'problem' is not the net or free speech, but the notoriously irresponsible handling of data by governments and proprietary interests, heightens the urgent role of art as a guarantor of critical expression across societal and territorial boundaries more than ever. |
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| 10.20 | Presentation | Roy Ascott | The School of Syncretic Strategy: from cybernetics to technoetics |
| Looking at the way we are now, we see that our planet is telematic, exhibiting dense and inclusive global connectivity; our media is moist, exploiting the convergence of dry digital and wet biological systems; our hypotheses are transitory, celebrating creative uncertainty; our mind is technoetic, extending the hypercortex, and expanding our access to the field of consciousness; our sensorium is enriched by prostheses that induce cyberception, enabling the cybernetic to merge with the psychic; our individual identity is multiple, mutating from the single-self organism; our reality is variable, seamlessly connecting manifold emergent worlds; and our substrate is nano, interfacing the material and immaterial conditions of being. In consequence, art will become progressively more syncretic, or risk losing entirely its social and spiritual significance. In this evolving ecology of mind, and new understanding of matter, we need to seed new organisms of learning and inquiry. If syncretic practice is to flourish, there is new knowledge to be identified, and transdisciplinary discourse to be developed. Usurping the Western paradigm, education will no longer privilege object over subject, system over process, form over behavior, reason over intuition, or matter over mind. Instead, the matrix of second-order cybernetics, and first-person technoetics will inform the learning environment. |
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| 11.00 | Presentation | Pier Luigi Capucci | Media education, education and media |
| The current mediascape requires a deep inquiry on the use of the media (of the “old” and “new” media) in many fields and in particular in the educational realm. Tools like computers, consoles, smartphones, extended TV, MP3 readers, photo and videocameras are of common use today and give rise to many applications which can change the way we get in touch each other, communicate, learn and teach. In our culture the remote and mediated communication has become increasingly relevant. In order to have an idea of the extent of this process, which occurred in less than 200 years, we could compare today’s many opportunities – synchronous communications like cellular and old plain telephony, IP based communications like Skype and chats, and asynchronous communications like email, fora, blogs, social networks and so on... – which can be very inexpensive, with the communications technologies which were available by mid of the XIX Century. Before the mass diffusion of photography (which Baudelaire considered as a bane) only a small number of people was able to create pictures. Today everybody can easily create images through many devices, like cameras, computers, smartphones, webcams... And photography has become that “brothel without walls” as defined by McLuhan. Today people can create videos in an easy and economic way, a common task that only twenty years ago was very difficult and expensive, and, more, they can share online their videos with millions people. Ten years ago the audiovisual remote synchronous communication was complex and expensive and only the television organizations could manage it. Today a videoconference can be made with cheap and personal tools which everybody can manage, just like PCs, smartphones and wired or wireless connections. And many other examples could be done. This evolution is opening up a wide bunch of unprecedented communication possibilities, which have changed and are changing the way people live, work, study, learn. People are experts in communication, are information producers, gatherers, disseminators, sharers, modifiers and storers. Communities are no more only country (locally)-based. Today an increasing part of the knowledge on the world we live in is achieved through the media (in a mediated way) and a relevant role in this trend is performed by the remote communications, both synchronous and asynchronous. People can instantly, inexpensively and easily communicate in remote and an increasing part of the communication is in remote. What for centuries has been the dream of the political and economic power, of the governments, of the inventors and of the magicians, is here and cheap today. This has a relevant role in teaching, since teachers are often in front of students who daily use these tools, who are born with them and maybe they are the best users of these tools. Experiences like e-learning, distance learning, videoconference, learning in the metaverse, interactive learning..., are usual. Since the early two thousand Noema has been developing and using some of these tools and experiences, and in 2010, in the Xth anniversary of Noema’s foundation, we are restructuring and improving the tools related to (new) media education and research. |
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| 11.20 | Coffee break | ||
| 11.40 | Presentation | Cristina Miranda, Matteo Ciastellardi | New Instruments for Teaching and Learning: do they change anything? |
| On the one hand, although the first steps in the formalization of online knowledge have been based on hierarchical classificatory systems, popular taxonomies called folksonomies have been growing in parallel. These taxonomies, supported by social networking tools help to make visible subjective forms of knowledge classification and interconnection: new classification tools open the possibility to society to manage knowledge by means of a collaborative approach, in a sustainable way. On the other hand, one of the most relevant possibilities to further this collaborative approach is the Internet of Things that enables knowledge to be embedded and situated in the physical work by means of different tools. The empowering of the personal and situated dimensions of knowledge triggered by Web 2.0 and Internet of Things generated an impact relating knowledge itself. The subjective influx in the codification of links, deals, bonds and contamination between the different layers of knowledge embedded in everyday life is shaping a new panorama in which "trusted" categories and concepts live together with subjective, "non trusted" definitions. This situation affects different research and knowledge fields. This paper will focus on the design field (connected design), firstly to show that it is necessary to develop methods to deal with both forms of knowledge (trusted and non trusted) in design; secondly, to explore which are the theoretical and practical possibilities to overcome some limitations of the actual paradigm; thirdly, to underline how design, and specially information design, can collaboratively define new guidelines to sustain and facilitate a bottom-up construction of knowledge in a specific field of application. Finally, the paper will present the contributions of Internet of Things to knowledge construction by analyzing a practical application -using QRcodes and Alphanumerical Strings- to the design process of an exhibition in Barcelona (Centro de Arts Santa Monica, Exhibition Condensed Matter) in 2010. |
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| 12.00 | Presentation | Enrica Borghi | The value of waste |
| "A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." Walter Benjamin In the Benjamin's essay “Angelus Novus” the Klee's angel is a figure who flies forward to the future with the head and the sight on the macerie. An heavy storm pushes him into the future. He can't stop to stare the past, the amount of ruins. The human skills of reading and interpreting the “waste” or the “ruines” behind our shoulders could become an interpretation of our society. We should open a discussion about what is an ideal of life in this society, which is the product of the materialistic approach. The historical materialismus damned an ideal vision of tomorrow. The ideals have been suffering of consumption since when they got products. So, at the end we can think about a new society looking for ideals like a zombie-consumer walking in a ruined supermarket. The megastores are the dumps that we have to sustain the future. Which ideal value do we give to the waste in our society? The life becomes waste in the Baumann's thought: how could we recycle it? the “waste” or the “ruines” are totally the World full of meaning by its own. Collecting, observing and devising means to be able of producing new meanings. Then the “waste”, the “ruines” and the “dumbs” are the elements for the next “Creation”. Art picks ud the waste from the dumb to insert it in an ethic/estetic new challenge. Art gives both material and immaterial values to the waste matter. The unformal objects find a form in a new world, connecting with the human ideas in a concrete way. |
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| 12.20 | Presentation | Giovanni Boccia Artieri | Education and Research in the Networked Publics Era. Spreadeable Knolewdge from Virtual Classroom to Amatorial Online Practices |
| From a sociological and mediological point of view we must force an important challenge that deals with the Net and the introduction of new possibilities for the communication and for the “mass personal” connection (blogs, social networks, etc.). In other words we are nowadays the witnesses of a dramatic mutation. It’s a qualitative and quantitative change. Individuals feel they’re not anymore the object (as audience, users, citizens, consumers, etc.) of a conversation, but they could be the subject of it (Boccia Artieri 2009). Both individuals and organizations could also communicate in a simple and personalized way with a very wide networked audience. This is a fundamental step to change the general audience/consumers/citizens into “networked publics” (Kazys 2008). A few things change: 1. the sense of position in communication - the perception that we have as individuals of our communicative role in the society and 2. the ways we listen or watch and elaborate what’s happening. We’re facing an accumulation of occasions in which individuals “play” with some self-representation forms and construct a “media attitude” (become media) thanks to a) the spread of reproduction and production technologies in daily life, from digital photocameras to editing softwares, allowing people to give life to media forms similar to the ones found in mainstream media, b) the growth of systems for disintermediation and contents sharing, from the web platforms to the social networking systems, and c) the acknowledgement of logics for the construction of contents and languages similar to mass media ones, but used in an environment where each individual is connected to each other. This is what blogs and social networks are teaching us. The reality of the web 2.0 represents a networked space where the reality of the “networked publics” can be produced and observed. In the social networks sites, inside the conversational reality of blogs, besides the video of everyday life posted on YouTube, we may observe ourselves while we’re constructing and sharing knowledge in a different way. The experience is networked trough the friendship languages of Facebook or trough the references system of the blogosphere: the reflexivity and the networked practices come into resonance in the reality of the world wide web. Here even the forms of hetero-representation generated by media products – movie, tv fiction, anime, etc. – become an opportunity for the self representation providing us the tools and the raw material for the production of new meaning in the UGC form: remix, mash up, etc. These networked practices (re-production, sharing, conversations) trigger the mechanisms of the reflexivity that link an individual to a collective reality and produce new forms of learning. In these context the learning environment has changed through a paradigm shift: from a culture of ownership and originality to a culture of sharing; from a knowledge economy that favors the building of stocks of knowledge to the need to continually update our inventory by participating in relevant "flows" of knowledge i.e. interactions that create knowledge or transfer it across individuals (Hagel, Brown and Davidson ); from top-down and informational forms of education to conversational and reciprocal ones. We are facing a participatory culture (Jenkins), including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. This paper will introduce some example of the new educational environment were live networked publics: - virtual classroom: from Facebook group to social learning network (e.g. edmodo) to Second Life experiences (e.g. UnAcademy, Unconventional Academy of Digital Culture); - spreadable education: projects that combine WYSIWYD ,open-source and widespread creativity, building collaborative learning environments (e.g. the 'pedagogical suitcase' designed to 'react' to various environmental stimuli and to establish different types of interaction which can be used to produce artwork, performance, and research on urban and social transformation). |
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| 12.40 | Presentation | Elif Ayiter | Conversations, P-individuals, Avatars: A Cybernetic Learning Strategy for the Metaverse |
| This study wishes to describe some of the key components of an art educational domain entitled ground<c>, which is being developed specifically for three dimensional online virtual worlds. This undertaking is based upon ‘The Groundcourse’, a revolutionary art educational strategy, based upon the constructivist educational theories of John Dewey as well as Cybernetics, developed and implemented in England during the 1960’s. The aim of the Groundcourse was to create an environment which would foster the rethinking of preconceptions, prejudices and fixations with regards to self, society, personal/social limitations, art and all the ensuing relationships through a range of carefully thought out asignments that entailed behavioral modification and indeed change. The Groundcourse employed the creation, enactment and observation of new personalities as an integral unit of its learning system. This is of particular significance in the virtual domain where not just one such new personality, but a whole pantheon of diverse identities can be created by a single individual. Thus, ground<c> aims to bring about this constituent pursuit of the Groundcourse through the avatar, the all important protagonist of three dimensional online virtual worlds. The efficacy of such a shift from the ‘real’ to the ‘virtual’ is substantiated by Cyberpsychological research which presents empirical evidence that the aquisition of novel characters creates behavioral change not only within the virtual environment itself but also, by extension, in real life. Just as its predecesor, ground<c> looks at Cybernetics, particularly when it comes to the exposition, analysis and observation of systems which involve multiple identites, created through alt avatars, by a single learner: In Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory the autonomous individual learner is reunderstood as a collection of psychological individuals (P-individuals). Thus Pask asserts that what it is we are mainly helping to educate/self-construct is not simply one person but rather a wide variety of interwoven competitive P-individuals, some of whom may execute in distributed fashion across many bodies and machines (Boyd, 2004). While it has to be clarified that Pask’s principal aim was to attain an understanding of the acquisition of human knowledge which would enable him to create AI systems, nonetheless his educational theory may well be adapted to the present work, i.e., an understanding of how the diverse P-individuals within one individual’s psyche may converse and learn from one another. The ensuing system can then be observed as a second order Cybernetic construct which presents a paradigm in which the observer is intimately connected to the observed, and what is considered is not the observed, but the observing system (Glanville, 2002). In short, an intrinsically autobiographical undertaking harnessed as learning activity toward the unfolding of creative potential. References Ascott, R., Shanken, E., 2003, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Pg: 107. Boyd, G. M., Jonassen, D. H. (ed), 2004, Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mahwah, NJ. Pg: 179. Glanville, R (2002), Second Order Cybernetics, Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems, EoLSS Publishers, Oxford, UK |
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| 13.00 | Presentation | Tommaso Tozzi | ASPETTI PROBLEMATICI DELLA NEW MEDIA EDUCATION NELLE ACCADEMIE DI BELLE ARTI ITALIANE |
| Del settore della New Media Education sono descritti i seguenti aspetti problematici che riguardano le Accademie di Belle Arti italiane: 1. Obiettivi Quali sono gli obiettivi per cui nascono questo tipo di Scuole? E quali sono gli obiettivi storici delle principali pratiche artistiche del settore della new media art? Sono finalità economiche o finalità culturali? Ci si sta dunque accingendo a formare degli artigiani, dei professionisti, degli artisti o dei soggetti in grado di mettere in moto dei processi di trasformazione culturale rivolti verso la felicità e il bene comune? 2. Competenze e formazione del docente La mancanza di competenze nel settore della new media education da parte dell'attuale personale in organico nelle Accademie pone dei problemi nella coerenza dei piani di studio didattici di Scuole che non nascono per mettere le tecnologie al servizio delle arti tradizionali. 3. Contratti e precari Le assunzioni a contratto sono una soluzione al problema delle competenze, ma ciò comporta una forma di lavoro precario che non fornisce tutela al lavoratore e crea una mancanza di rappresentatività di tale settore all'interno delle strutture accademiche. 4. Artisti o docenti? La presenza di artisti nel corpo docente è un vantaggio o uno svantaggio? Potrebbe essere necessario un settore specifico per la formazione dei futuri docenti di new media education e in che modo questo potrebbe distinguersi dai modelli della formazione professionale? 5. Spazi Il nuovo settore richiede nuovi spazi. Ciò richiede un maggior impegno economico dello Stato e un'ottimizzazione degli spazi attualmente utilizzati nelle Accademie. È possibile prevedere una riorganizzazione degli spazi nelle Accademie, stante gli attuali rapporti di potere interni? 6. Attrezzature Le problematiche degli spazi sono analoghe a quelle relative alle attrezzature. Per sopperire a tali carenze, una soluzione che mescola l'industria con la didattica rischia di rendere quest'ultima strumento di promozione della tecnologia, anziché luogo dove affrontare tale tema in modo critico e indipendente. 7. Armonizzazione della didattica L'armonizzazione dei corsi, della loro propedeuticità, del relativo orario e delle relazioni tra docenti è un problema che richiede l'esistenza di strutture didattiche preposte alla sua risoluzione, ma è anche un problema umano che riguarda il personale docente e le sue capacità relazionali. 8. Pubblico/Privato: diritti del cittadino e radici culturali Le soluzioni economiche ai problemi appena descritti non devono gravare sui diritti di qualsiasi cittadino a ricevere una corretta istruzione dallo Stato. La mancanza degli investimenti necessari da parte dell'attuale governo nel settore della formazione rischia altresì di cedere il settore della formazione pubblica in mano ai privati, con una possibile conseguente mancanza di tutela degli interessi del cittadino e della collettività a favore di interessi privati ed economici. |
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| 13.20 | Lunch break | ||
| 14.50 | Presentation | Pavel Sedlak | Learning by Doing: A Prague Perspective |
| 15.10 | Presentation | Roberto Muffoletto | The End of Learning As We know It |
| Historically, technology devices and instructional systems have been used to deliver instruction and to maintain control over content. Before World War II the teacher was the center of “control” over the delivery of the curriculum and its form. After World War II it was the system that began to assume more control not only of the curriculum, the content, but its delivery as well. This turning point in education, and the use of media, systemized the process of schooling in an effort to make it more efficient and effective. Learning and teaching changed as the result of the introduction of programmed instruction (the Skinner Teaching Machine) and systematic learning (SRA Kits). Over the last 50 years teachers have been deskilled in the areas of pedagogy, curriculum development, and evaluation. As a result education is formed around a means-end model (rational instrumentality), with pre-determined outcomes and expectations. Using the emerging digital devices and networks, the system is reaching for more control over the schooling process. How art education, and art in education responds to the developments in networked digital communications and access technologies will range between the extremes of reproducing the status-quo or a complete reconstruction of the teaching learning environment. Will anything really change? A short flight through “Second Life” will reveal the reproduction of “the way schools are today” but in a virtual environment. Very little has changed. Avatars for the most part look like humanoids. Second Life in many ways mirrors the reality we have grown up with. In traditional schooling teachers still use the lecture mode for teaching art history, critiques are teacher centered, and students are walled in working as individuals or with those in geographic proximity. Rewards and punishments are based upon a modernist point of being, In many ways teaching and learning still reflect behaviorist theories reaching for pre-defined “right” answers. Over the last twenty years with the development of the Internet, digital devices, and creative production programs, matched with a constructivist learning theory, art education has the opportunity to change how it does business. Collaborative learning, global perspectives, cross-cultural exchanges, the changing nature of the art making, and the “experiencing” of experience provides educational programs and students alike, an opportunity to inquire into the nature of creativity, interpretation, meaning construction and deconstruction of signification. Not only has the nature of the aesthetic experience changed, but the reader of the “text” as well. Art education, and education in the arts, needs to draw upon other models (I refrain from saying new models) for creating learning environments and not instructional environments. Art and art in education needs to move towards an immersive intelligence, situating the experience within a postmodernist paradigm, engaging various ways of world making and of being. Drawing upon the emerging creative and intellectual tools, the connective nature of a singularity, the emergence of new visions of what is art and art making, and what it means to be human/transhuman, to remain relevant education in the arts needs to transform itself. |
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| 15.30 | Presentation | Fabio Fornasari, Sveva Avveduto | Research, art, education: new insights and visions at the crossroad of social media |
| The starting point of our work is based on the statement that research reality needs its ‘story-telling’ to function and be effective, to study and define its “mythological origins”. The abstract theories time is over, and the time of “re-connection”, of “re-construction” and of linkages of knowledge and experiences has taken its place. The paper presents the first results of a joint research project, “Ricerca e imagine abitata”, that aims at studying and producing objects to implement “new models of art in education and new perspectives on art and its formation”. The specific part of our project we intend to present is the “story-dimension” of research within social networks: a medium, a narrative technology in constant progress and evolution. The “Ricerca e imagine abitata” Project is in this dimension conceived as a “story of stories”, not as a research communication work. Representing research as a narrative path gives us the experimentation field to test and verify connections between social space and the construction of world images through the building and perception of specific language in the narrative dimension of research. The paper will refer to a series of art installations (both in real and on the net) that put together the art and poetry dimensions within the research definition and description, through the exhibition of different research content that include both either art and soft and hard sciences. The art/science/research installations that have been already completed in different Italian locations, will be conceptually presented, as they reflect the intersection point that stems out from the research milieu and from partners background and contribution: the art education and research side, and the social sciences R&D one. Approaching the primary sources of cultural behaviours at the crossroad of art education and social research in the common ground of social media, is one of the main objectives of the entire research project. |
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| 15.50 | Presentation | Assila Cherfi | Fragmentation as a direct connection between images and imagination in film and video |
| 16.10 | Coffee break | ||
| 16.30 | Presentation | Simona Caraceni | Technology in higher education of arts |
| The case of a learning envirorment for an Academy of Fine Art, devoted to art, design and multimedia. The collaborative envirorment was applyed also for the staff of the Academy: history of an experience. |
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| 16.50 | Presentation | Polona Tratnik | Interdisciplinary Approaches to New- and Inter-Media Art Education and Research |
| Inter-media art bases on the principle of fusion of different media and also the field includes several non-traditional sorts of art. In the last 50 years the field of art has widened and has included structures and discourses from other social fields, thus art has become increasingly socially reflexive and transdisciplinary based. The structure and function of the very contemporary art (transart) have changed a lot if one only considers its striving to exceed modern canons, to intervene into the social space to stimulate critical discourse, and tendency to actively connect art with science, to develop specialized technologies and conduct research, and to develop complex philosophical discourse. The methods used in education and research of such art need to be reconsidered according to the changing nature of art and in relation to the non-artistic fields involved in the transart compositions. The author argues that the proper methodology for introducing such art to education system and society should ground in interdisciplinary approaches. |
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| 17.10 | Presentation | Alberto D'Ottavi | |
| 17.30 | Presentation | tbd | |
| 17.50 | Break | ||
| 18.10 | Panel | Pier Luigi Capucci | Giovanni Boccia Artieri, Stephen Kovats |
| Friday, 17th Dec. 2010 | |||
| EXPERIENCES | |||
| 9.00 | Welcome | ||
| 9.30 | Keynote | Michel Bauwens, Adam Arvidsson, Bertram Niessen, Massimo Menichinelli | The P2P Foundation as an ecology of peer learning |
| For five years, the P2P Foundation, a global community of researchers centered around the understanding and promotion of peer to peer practices, has peer produced its own ecology of collective learning. In this video interview/presentation, we will discuss the experiences, both successes and failures, so far. |
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| 10.00 | Presentation | Antonio Caronia | Learning doesn’t mean submission. Freedom and profitability in school systems. |
| Do we really need schools? Do society really need a separate institution to transfer knowledge to young people and “educate” them? The answer depends, obviously, on how we conceive society, and particularly on what we think about this turbo-capitalistic society we are living in. About forty years ago, Ivan Illich wrote a book whose title was clear-cut and unmistakable: Deschooling Society. To an institutionalized school Illich opposed an idea of self-directed education. He understood how universal and istitutional schooling was an effective tool not for a better learning, but for a better submission of men and women to the logic of an institutionalized society. He didn’t like such a society, so he preferred, instead of schools, “educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” In the same years, Michel Foucault devoted himself to the study of the power apparatuses throughout the history of Western culture. He never produced a specific analysis about the educational institutions, as definite and accurate as the the ones he dedicated to the sanity and prison systems, but in his works we find concepts and hints to analyse school as a power apparatus. After forty years, schools are more and more subjected to the ideological pressure of capitalistic profitability, and are less and less useful ways of genuine and convivial socialization. Digital technologies, for their part, could offer powerful tools for such a task, if freed from oppressive economic concerns. Maybe it’s time to come back to Illich’s and Foucault’s suggestions, if we don’t want to be submerged by the new, soft dictatorship of a post-fordist economy. |
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| 10.20 | Presentation | Tarin Gartner | Performance art and relational art: a call for modernism and post modernism concepts |
| My study has the aim to explore and identify the act of using the “self” and the “Daily life” in performance art and in relational art in contemporary art. My argument starts from questioning if these two forms of art react and contribute to the postmodern discourse of the ‘decentred self’1 , the ‘truth’ and the fabricated and created/performed ‘identity’. As an artist I use my “self” and autobiography as a resource for my art, especially questions on my identity. Reacting on my personal interest and way of doing art, I find it necessary to question the use of the “self” and the “Daily life” in art and to understand the nature of truth in this act. In the theoretic part I choose to examine two art manifestations that often have autobiographical nature; performance art and relational art. By performance art I refer to a young artistic medium originated from the U.S.A and Europe in late 60’s. It is a live event, created and performed by the artist, as source and theme for his/her work. It is generally characterized by its "live" nature as the artist communicates directly with the audience, its impact may be amusing or shocking but it must be memorable. Also characteristic in performance art is the breaking down of aesthetic conventions, and the blurring of boundaries between theatre and visual art, and art from life.2 Because performance art is perceived as an autobiographical manifestation, and since it is common to conceive that autobiography as a synonymous with a true self, it is accepted to find correlation between the self and its representation in performance art. By relational art, I refer to a new movement in contemporary art, staring in the 90’s firstly defined by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud as “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”3 . Relational art depends entirely on its environment and audience, the audience very often become a sort of a community, and the work of art creates situations in which viewers are addressed as a collective or temporary social entity and they are the performers that create the work. It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion. Rational art according to Nicolas Bourriaud started a new historical period called Altermodern4 . I see in relational art many affinities with performance art, and so my start point on this issue is considering it as part of postmodern discourse, but I will take in consideration Bourriaud ideas and claims. My research starts with the central thesis that discusses if self performance and relational art are deconstructive practices that uncover the constructed nature of crucial concepts, like the “self”, “subject”, “truth” and “identity”, to which mainstream Western thoughts that has dominated and formed Western culture in the last four-hundred years, attributes values of neutrality, naturalness and essentiality, and on the basis of which hegemonic moral, social and psychological theories have been constituted, theories that promised the individual his salvation, freedom and equality. The artist’s use of the ‘self’ and ‘daily life’, in performance art and rational art, devises and presents an ambivalent subjectivity that evades existing and legitimate cultural models. The artist puts to test notions of the unified ‘self’, ‘subject’, ‘identity’ and ‘truth’, and question its definition. I’m interested in arguing that postmodern artist makes a deconstructive use of autobiographical representation in order to challenge the obvious supposition that the artist present an authentic and essential true by drawing on autobiographical materials. I’m interested in examining the play between real and artificial. I regard the subject-artist in this research as a manifestation of the postmodern subject who is conscious of the idea that postmodernism renounce the modern concept of an ‘Absolute Truth’5 . That means that there is no way of ‘a priori’ judgment of the truth. For that there is no reason why anyone should desire that his personal truth would be valid on the other. This means that each person should find his own set of beliefs and should not attempt to force his morality on somebody else. If the artist is conscious of the constructed nature of reality, and who creatively and effectively navigates its being in this world, the result is that using the ‘self’ and ‘daily life’ contribute a playground of creative experimentation for the artist and for contemporary art. |
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| 10.40 | Presentation | Salvatore Iaconesi, Stefano Bonifazi | Utopian Architectures and the dictatorship of the imaginary |
| The paper describes a multi-author research path emerged in-between the general discussion taking place on the AHA mailing-list, and later formally detailed. The focal node of the dialogue is an "architectural" vision of the strategies of conflict and critique. Analisys is multidirectional and multidisciplinary. Starting from the idea of the clash among languages and codes that is embodied in education practices and in the strategies for production and dissemination of imaginaries, it continues by describing the cultural and education strategies that contribute in defining the "design" (and the role of the "designer") as a tool for authority, operating between linited visions, utopias and desire. The discussion, sythesized and formalized in the text, ends by suggesting possible scenarios for the education practices that better seem to embody the more effective reaction and critique models, also describing nomadic and recombinant scenarios narrated under the form of an evolution of the "conference". The work is "open/emergent", and it will be implemented as a multiple-voice digital platform right after the conference, using an innovative visualization system creating a parallel between the visions of architectural design and information architectural design. The platform will be used during the presentation, and it will be released with a GPL2 license. |
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| 11.00 | Presentation | Alessandro Ludovico | Neural, magazine as a node |
| Neural, magazine as a node Neural is one of the most influential magazines of digital art founded in 1993. The magazine's mission is to filter and diffuse progressive and propulsive concepts and notions as well as to be a node in a larger network of digital culture publishers and practitioners. The endeavor to be a node in a network has led it to become a founding member of Mag.net (Magazine network of electronic cultural publishers), an international network of magazines addressing new media art. Mag.net's members are mutually supporting each other under the motto: "Collaboration is Better than Competition". Their activities are questioning the concept of traditional publishing, yet maintaining the editor's role in content's selection. That's one of the reasons why Neural has always been a terrain for research about the use of digital technologies in printed publishing. Its history of editing contents about digital art and culture has been merged with experiments made with paper medium in order to publish the results of networked activities, defining print as a quintessential of the web and re-thinking archiving of printed content in the era of overwhelming and distracting amount of information. |
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| 11.20 | Coffee break | ||
| 11.40 | Presentation | Gerfried Stocker | Ars Electronica |
| I will try to contribute to your topic from the viewpoint of an organization which at the same time takes care of art, education and research. It is often said that museums are places of education. Especially nowadays the educational part is often seen even bigger than the research, which has been their stronghold for a very long time. Even though there is still an ongoing debate whether this new consumer orientation has more to do with politicians and corporate sponors pushing for higher visitor numbers, I would argue that it is part of a larger shift in the general paradigms of education. A shift that has to be seen as an intrinsic consequence of the digital revolution and it's impact on the way how knowledge has become easily accessible all over the world. But we are also getting more and more used to interactive media and this raises the expectations towards participation, especially among young people who grow up with internet and computer games. Already in 2001 Ars Electronica devoted a festival to the new generation of digital creatives who emerged as a new phenomenon also in the art world. Talented young people with high skills and the strong ambition to take over the Internet as a stage for their artistic expression but also as a field of commercial activities. Access to knowledge suddenly was not only available to the elite of those who could affort to go to art school. In contrary it seemed to be even much easier for those who were staying outside the institutions and their slow and rigid system of still mainly old man teaching things the way they had been thought for decades. Instead of limiting yourself to the few teachers you could get hold of in your university you just went out on the net and found all those masters of the new media no matter where they were living. Even more: everything you need to become one of these new hybrid audio-visual-performing-installation artist is out there in the net. The inspiration, the tools, the audience and immediately you get the feedback on your own attempts, failures or improvements from many of the very experts and peers in these creative communities. The only thing you still need is the urge, the will to learn and to improve your skills. Considering this, we will find more and more hotspots of knowledge and creativity all over the world including countries and regions that we haven't even recognized until now. |
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| 12.00 | Presentation | Marco Mancuso | DIGICULT. Digital Art e New Media Theories tra riflessione critica e formazione |
| Digicult è dal 2005 una piattaforma culturale ed editoriale, online e offline, che si occupa dell'impatto delle nuove tecnologie e delle scienze sull'arte, il design, la cultura e la società contemporanea. Digicult è stato fondato ed è diretto da Marco Mancuso e si basa sulla partecipazione attiva di oltre 50 professionisti che rappresentano un ampio Network di giornalisti, curatori, artisti, teorici e critici nell'ambito della new media art. Digicult pubblica il magazine mensile Digimag, che si occupa con approccio critico e giornalistico di specifiche tematiche culturali, artistiche e produttive come: arte in rete, hacktivism, video art, sound art, audiovideo, design, arte e scienza, new media, software art e performing art. Marco Mancuso trasferisce da alcuni anni la sua ricerca il suo approccio storico-critico e la sua esperienza curatoriale curatoriale all'interno di una serie di seminari e lezioni multidisciplinari in università e accademie in Italia e in Europa e all'interno del suo corso "Linguaggi delle arti multimediali" alla Naba-Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano. |
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| 12.20 | Presentation | IOCOSE | In the Long Run |
| 13.00 | Presentation | Sonia Cillari | Performative Spaces and the Body as Interface |
| I was trained as an architect, then chose the art and science field to investigate the way human beings can actually ‘ make experience’ of space and how we, as perceivers, reconstruct the internal and external worlds by means of our sensorial system. My work aims to emphasize both the physical and the metaphorical ways in which human beings relate with each other and with their environment, mainly indicating the fundamental relationships between our internal and external worlds. These are all of our experiences that determine how things exist to us and how we make experience of the immense ‘not void’ that surrounds us, in which we are immersed as ‘body’ and as ‘agents of emotions’. Over the years, my work has fused all these fundamentals into the creation of sensorial and perceptual mechanisms, immersive spatial works that are at the intersection of architecture and performance art; they are what I refer to as ‘performance-space expression’ - the creation of physical spaces, perceptible to the senses , each segment of which contains potential realities, some revealing natural phenomena, some not. My artistic investigation examines how patterns of consciousness, perception and identity emerge in such settings. I use participation as a continuous mutation of the initial spatial conditions, to reinforce the ‘external-to-you’ as continuously variable. Over the last years I have been specifically interested in a field of research related to the ‘Body as Interface’. My concern was to show that the boundaries of the self extend beyond our skin. Specifically, I was interested in what ‘skin consciousness’ is, and in how presence, proximity and touch can redirect the way we understand ourselves and others, exploring experiences of bodily expansion. A mutual element in these works is an experimental practice revealing a sense of instability and impermanence. From our individual subjective position we gain access to undiscovered shared phenomena. It is important to enrich our perception with a different spatial sensibility. Our perception doesn’t identify the ‘external world’, as it really is – organic, fluid, centre of probabilistic waves – but only in the way we are allowed to recognize it. As the process of becoming aware of the external becomes true by the acquisition of information through our senses, new spatial behaviors need to emerge, creating higher levels of dynamic physical interactions between us and with our environment. We need to create environmental stimuli to redirect these physical and psychological stages of human behaviors. Sensing such spatial experiences might extend throughout and even beyond the living body. |
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| 13.20 | Lunch break | ||
| 14.50 | Presentation | Amos Bianchi | The Chance Keepers |
| Does chance exist? Is the chance real? This presentation does not have the aim to give an answer to these questions. The starting point is the assumption that chance exists, and that it could be examined within its own metaphysics. Such metaphysics is based on the notion of event, which is pure, absolute singularity, something that it is not possible to subdue to a rule, a law, an order (from Deleuze, The fold). The notion of event has the power to break the kosmos, the preconstituted and imposed world. Thus, the event – singularity is conceived to be something generating reality rather than a part of it. Which are the fields in which the metaphysics of the chance can be applied? First, the arts. Jorge Luis Borges gives a perfect representation of the metaphysics of the chance in The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). Furthermore, Smoking/No smoking (1993), a movie by the French director Alain Resnais, and the novel Kosmos, by Witold Gombrowicz (1965), should be taken into account. In all these works, chance (event, singularity) generates some bifurcations, that lead to different worlds. The contemporary interactive art, too, is a powerful representation of the metaphysics of chance, allowing the user to explore different paths within the same scenario. It would be naïve to think that the metaphysics of chance is strictly related to some kind of art, in opposition to the scientific field. In fact, since the publication of Chance and Necessity, by Jacques Monod (1970), and the Bell’s theorem (1964), chance has become a word used in the vocabulary of biology and physics. If the metaphysics of the chance is accepted, then the notion of Kosmos – the power to reduce the eternal variation of the world to One – is to be denied. But this notion is as metaphysical as the one of chance. Using Whitehead’s terminology: we can see that the metaphysics of Kosmos and chance are the opposition between the One and the Many. In conclusion, the ethical choice between the two does appertain to the single individual. |
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| 15.10 | Presentation | Sarah Ciracì | Art like a bridge between the achievements of scientific thought and the consciousness and perception man has of himself and reality |
| 15.30 | Presentation | Efe Levent | Developing a Sense of Responsibility in an Age of Manipulation |
| The most common mistake we make when imagining our beloved 21st century in a chronological continuum is to draw a straight line which starts with our ancestors walking out of a cave clad in bearskin, flint in hand. After the superstitious darkness of the Middle Ages comes a slight curve upward with the push of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This is followed by an even sharper curve with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and industrialisation, which then ends up as a line that is both parallel to the y axis (which indicates 'progress') and perpendicular to the x axis (which indicates time). The emphasis of this schematised representation is doubtless always on technological improvement. What is left behind, however, is the speed with which every invention which was meant to free us from our shackles has been converted into a tool of manipulation. This results in the means of oppression becoming ever more sophisticated, as described by Steven Lukes in his idea of 'the third dimension of power'. A brief look at various inventions which fall into this category serves to illustrate the above point. Lawrence Lessig demonstrates how the 'invention' of the internet, with all the best intentions of creating a platform for collective deliberation and precipitating human progress, has been manipulated by copyright legislation and commercial interest into increasingly becoming a ‘read only’ culture. The Dadaist invention of irony has been turned around by Warhol to a device that insidiously venerates both the genius of the artist and the aesthetic beauty of consumerism. Although the 'goodness' of the intentions behind it are debatable, psychotherapy was developed by Freud as a means of suppressing basic human urges to free up human faculties for tasks deemed more worthy of the species’ collective interest. But, as it is now well known, the practice was turned on its head by Edward Bernays and made into a manipulative system designed to sell consumer goods. The second wave of psychotherapy championed by Wilhelm Reich has similarly been adopted to form the basis of contemporary market research. The list above can stretch to infinity. My own research focus, however, is on the video games industry. If we are to summarise one core aspect of video gaming that has developed over the practice's short history, we cannot start with the massive improvements in graphic representations, nor the introduction of the internet and the consequent technological infrastructure for multiplayer online gaming. We have to start with the industry’s increasing sophistication in the way it overcomes its customers’ rational defences. Video game developer Jonathan Blow exposes some of these tools of cognitive manipulation and urges fellow developers to cultivate a sense of responsibility and refrain from making use of them. I have previously studied the means by which players of World of Warcraft regularly challenge notions of 'virtual reality' and 'cyberspace' by installing social constructs they have brought with them from the 'real world' in an unfamiliar environment. Presently I am preparing to embark upon a new study of communities of video game ‘modders’ who are concerned about the subject of ethical responsibility as identified by Jonathan Blow. My interest in the noemalab conference lies in my desire to situate this research within a wider context of art, technology and education. |
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| 15.50 | Presentation | Massimiliano Viel | Between noise and silence. An approach to music analysis, composition and pedagogy from the standpoint of "repetition" |
| In spite of its relevance or maybe just because of its self-evidence, repetition in music rarely received an appropriate attention in music analysis, besides its characterization as a basic analytical and compositional device. Even in the field of music analysis, most of the approaches to psychological correlates are in fact focused more on pattern detection in well-learned dimensions of the skilled listening, than on the detection process as a part of the listening activity. This often led musicologists to criticize the presence of psychological correlates in music analysis as arbitrary and non objective and to turn the attention to the more objective musical text. The analysis of musical listening is nevertheless needed to found a musicological approach to the analysis of European and as well Extra-european repertoires, oral traditions' music and popular music. The detection of repetitions in the sound stream as a fundamental activity of the listening mind shows a strong potential in developing a psychological analysis in search for objectivity, versatility and computability. A few applications in the pedagogy of music composition and music production are then presented. |
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| 16.10 | Coffee break | ||
| 16.30 | Presentation | Marco Baravalle | The experience of S.a.L.E |
| Starting from the experience of S.a.L.E. ( www.saledocks.org ) I will try to focus on the wider problem of the relationships between art, economy and subjectivity in the contemporary metropolis. S.a.L.E. is an independent art space founded in Venice three years ago by a group of people coming from the experience of the “Centri sociali”. Since then it has been producing exhibitions (both with young or well known artists such as Yona Friedman, Gianfranco Baruchello and Martha Cooper), publications (L’arte della sovversione; Manifestolibri; 2009), seminars and events. Another important part of our activity is a work of constant enquiry about the conditions of the metropolitan “precariat” employed by cultural institutions. S.a.L.E. wants to experiment a new kind of art project, an alternative to the dominant model of immaterial (cultural) exploitation of the materiality of the urban fabric. S.a.L.E. tries to be an actor inside a context in which art and other forms of contemporary expressions have a big influence over the economic and the social dimension. S.a.L.E. is a small model for understanding art as a common: something which goes beyond property logic, beyond the growth of real estate rent and beyond the precarity of the cultural living labour. |
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| 16.50 | Presentation | Alterazioni Video | The Californization of the Planet |
| Flip flop, joint and beer. Is this the new American dream? Someone is shouting us to layback and re-connect. No, is not about the green wave . The Planet is never been healthier! It's our imagination that is jeopardized. Is our ability in slowing down the processes, what ever they are, that needs to be preserved and amplified . We lost control of finance algorithms, we lost control on the image making machine. After the economic breakdown, after the 2.0 thunderstorm, is time to have some fun ! The undertow is a chance. And a good one. Waiting for the next Tsunami is a surfer attitude. We were expecting the big wave. We have been waiting enough. We are the big wave, again. California is shouting to us. California is not a state. Is a an Idea. California doesn't own anything. California learns and absorb from what surrounds her and amplifies it. Surf is Hawaiian, Cinema' is French, the blond girls are German… Californian Corporations programmers are today demiurges The web is been imagined and defined in San Francisco. Youtube videos duration, the English language, no pussy no cocks....all the rules are been decided in California. Some how California rules our imaginary. The easy way, the California way, is become a standard. We amplify our social life through Californian social network. But we have no enemies, because we speak just to our community. That’s their way. It's easier. Still, we have no friends, just their images, their digital shadows. Digital Images are alive, this for sure. They transform, mutate, evolve and are always there for you. Relax, you won't be forgot. Our culture is affected by a form of acute visual bulimia. A "Californian one" We need to rethink our relation with images and understand our compulsive attitude toward them. Let's face it: Images are a goods of prime necessity. They are our only partners for the invisible journey, a democratic partner that anyone can access. We need to learn from them. In their silent way. we need to understand who is training who. We need to become aware of their nature. When Images oblige people to remain silent before them or at least to lower their voices they are aware of their power. Each image aware of it's power is Art. No matter where it comes form. It will be remembered. How to learn from them is a didactic challenge that we can't forsake. Alterazioni Video will try to explain through videos and slideshows which are the symptoms that are driving our imagination towards a Californization of the planet ( and not just the western world!) In our head, the Californization is already started. Doesn't matter if you know it or not. Let it flow |
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| 17.10 | Presentation | Jaromil | NIMk - Netherlands Media Art Institute |
| 17.30 | Presentation | Kiuru Satu | How can I draw something that I haven’t known beforehand - Unconscious in art process |
| I have always been fascinated how we can draw something that we don’t know already, or have seen before. As an searching artist I’m also very interested in tacit knowing, and what is the connection between these two above-mentioned items. In my artwork I’m working with the same subjects and themes in my photos and videos, which I also paint and draw. I think that drawing is the most important to my artistic thinking because I have realized that embodied working is a great source of ideas for me. I believe that there is mutual connection between head and hand; you can describe your thoughts by pencil to paper but you can also understand something new by drawing, that is tacit knowing – knowledge without words. As Michael Polanyi has said: “We can know more than we can say ”. It’s also quite difficult to say which one is first: the artistic thinking or artistic doing. According Anton Ehrenzweig the creativity arises from vague and unconscious perceptions and processes . The embodied working is like a key to the world of unconscious. When the unconscious is working via my art process it’s bringing up something new that my conscious hasn’t realized before – or wanted to realize. An also during to the art process, coincident, mistakes, fails and time are working and giving me new answers (or questions). I have a feeling like my hand or body understands the whole picture before and better than me. So, I can only ask are those fails really mistakes? We don’t understand or know exactly how subconscious is working in the art process. I have studied this subject in my own artwork from phenomenal viewpoint and I have seen that the unconscious is the great source of creativity and working in all the process. Art process is also bringing up the moment of unconscious to study. This searching is possible in the phenomenological reduction where one has to forget the obvious way of thinking. Actually the nature of the art process is all the time reduction; one has to forget the old form of doing and open to the new way to go. At this moment we are very interested in different sources of creativity and how to create and use those more effective way. I believe that embodied art working is the opportunity and the only way to research how unconscious is working in creativity process. |
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| 17.50 | Break | ||
| 18.10 | Panel | Antonio Caronia | Gerfried Stocker, Josephine Bosma |
| Saturday, 18th Dec. 2010 | |||
| THEORIES | |||
| 9.00 | Welcome | ||
| 9.30 | Keynote | Siegfried Zielinski | |
| 10.00 | Presentation | Alan Shapiro | Transforming Computer Science into a Humanities Subject |
| 10.20 | Presentation | Tine Melzer | VERBAL VISUALIZATION |
| ‚If one says Red (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.‘ Josef Albers ‘There is nothing in the intellect which doesn’t come from the senses.’ John Locke How do words relate to the visible world? What is the relationship between names and colours? Do we verbalize visual experiences in order to share them? How does memory store and alter visual and verbal language? What are the verbal conditions for seeing visual language? Here come some common places: A rose is red. That was the last drop. The sound of the ocean. Interdisciplinary research requires a strategy which holds for several disciplines. Research between image and text, between visual art and philosophy, between visual and verbal language is an act of translation. Artistic practice and research depend on understanding the workings of ordinary language. Conventions, rules and patterns are structures which all language has in common – understanding simple mechanisms in the language of the everyday can help identify structures which image, media and context are ruled by. The meaning of a visual work is not encapsulated in our words, but we need words to describe it. Identifying the differences between describing and showing can facilitate understanding verbal language as a host for visual language. Teaching is a language-game. It is no secret that our experiences and judgements are influenced by our memory. The edge between image and imagination can easily be discovered and indicated by simple games to challenge the limits of our senses, of our vision or our cognitive capacity. But another element which influences the way we see things is language. Our worlds depends on our words. In ordinary language we have stored everything it takes to share the images we see. The language-games we play can become efficient tools in the sharing, judging and making of valuable artistic and research production. Our commonplaces, our daily routines, the physical limitations of our body and our senses and – and that’s the main claim – our habits of language-use determine what we see. These issues will be addressed by brief episodes from ongoing research on the edge of verbal and visual language, experimental set-ups in the field of conceptual art and teaching at the art academy. |
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| 10.40 | Presentation | Domenico Quaranta | Talking to a Wider Audience: New Media in the Art Fair |
| Besides other issues, new media education has to face another problem: that of introducing new media art practices to the broader contemporary art audience. Along the last fifteen years, curators and art critics tried to do it writing books and organizing special interest exhibitions in museums. As for art fairs – one of the most popular exhibition formats between the mid Nineties and the new millennium, a time slice that somebody called “the art fair age” - this mission has been usually undertaken, and usually took the form of a panel debate, rather than of an exhibition. A quite interesting exception has been offered, in the last decade, by ARCO, the contemporary art fair in Madrid and one of the most visited worldwide. In 1998, ARCO launched a special section on new media, called Arco Electronico. The section resisted 12 years, frequently changing its name and format until 2008, when it was called Expanded Box. The Expanded Box included a selection of solo projects, submitted by galleries and selected by a curator, and a panel discussion, organized by the curator. As the curator of the section in 2009 and 2010, I will focus on these two editions, introducing the projects and discussing the issues raised by the introduction of this topics into an art fair. |
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| 11.00 | Presentation | James Moore, Barry Cooper | The 3 ecologies as a design pedagogy |
| This article is concerned with the design of an undergraduate interactive media project within a
traditionally broadcast media-teaching environment. As such our first concern was to reframe the
previous unit title Genre and Audience, now Systems and Users. This renaming is indicative of the shift we
sought to articulate. The intention was to move away from representation [the production of media
artefacts] towards the design of participatory architectures, undermining the fixity of the sign and
embracing the metaphors of relational complexity offered by ecological systems.
The crucial question behind such a shift in pedagogy was whether teaching traditional Broadcast genres
and their relationship to audiences tends to reinforce a subject/object binary incompatible with the
urgent imperatives brought about by ecological/geo-political narratives of collapse. The unit was
designed to strategise alternative understandings to those afforded by linear media
[pictorial/narrative/sonic]. As a starting point we took Heidegger’s argument that representation
constructs its objects (in this case the environment) as a commodity for human consumption.
The unit took as its core reading Felix Guattari’s “The Three Ecologies” which extends the notion of
ecology beyond the environment to an ecology of the mind and an ecology of the social. Guattari calls for
the production of new subjectivities in these domains, identifying the “mass media” as infantalising and
instrumental in environmental and social degradation. The project design questioned whether the
throughputs of “network culture’ might allow new subjectivities which are relational, [rather than
objectifying] interactive and codependent to emerge – multiple and simultaneous subjectivities operating as
components in a design ecology. Teaching methods We review the method of integrating theory and practice [praxis] as a pedagogy applicable to 1st year undergraduates. We detail the range of student experiences [walking, debating, designing] students encountered when asked to answer the research question ‘what is the mineral tramway and how do we know it?’ The tramway is a post-industrial zone where the toxicity of mine tailings is a substrate to imaginings of heritage and tourist simulacra. Students new to the area had their impressions of Cornwall, (a globally popular tourist destination) challenged when asked to directly sense the ground beneath their feet rather than resort to conventional narrative and representation. The design brief placed a series of obstructions in their path such as; no dialogue; no characters; no music. Replacing the habitual reliance on video & audio, students were asked to use vibration, wind, thermal and motion sensors, generating environmentally captured and historical data sets. The arguments put forward by Guattari were also not to be taken at face value. Instead the text was debated and evaluated through a series of student led presentations [hub seminars]. Reading and presenting theory alongside project production allowed the students some critical distance in regard of their own subjectivities in relation to consumerism, broadcast media, heritage and tourism. The article documents 4 case study projects that employed techniques / technologies such as arduino, processing, augmented reality, motion tracking, site specific installation and data visualization. |
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| 11.20 | Coffee break | ||
| 11.40 | Presentation | Franco Torriani | Artists residencies: towards a mobility to come? |
| I would have titled this short paper ‘Portentous residencies’, but I admit that portentous may be too related to something threatening as in Melville or Pincheon’s atmospheres. In fact I’m considering the twenty years of programs and experiences of the Pépinières Européennes pour jeunes artistes (*), an Organization ‘networking’ in Europe and Canada(Québec) on artistic mobility. Mobility is one of the most important driving forces of contemporary culture. It has been and still is for me a singular and unique experience. Singular because the Pépinières, by supporting the mobility of young artists and creative professionals on the European scene, developed an original concept of mobility in synchrony with today’s world of creation. Unique because this complex topic of mobility is transnational, attentive to the context, interdisciplinary sensible to innovative forms of expressions, realities, technologies. Attentive to the young generation of artists, the Pépinières keeps track of emerging tendencies, in art and beyond(…), in order to translate them in residencies programs all across Europe and Québec. Residencies open to interdisciplinary cross-breading, to interpersonal relationship with the aim to create links with different places, cultures, audiences. To make the most of a residency you have to face continuous challenges, new visions, to dare to go on unusual and almost unexplored places, to intriguing practices… You’ll find, I am convinced, in this ‘long run’ points in common with some keywords of these three days meeting at NABA, Milano, from Relevant Experiences to Changing Visions, New Creativity, and may be a few cases of Art on the Edge… The mission means also to embrace different media, not to limit themselves to the established institutions, to accompany the creative practitioners during and beyond their residencies. We have to act being conscious of our environment ( …”each animal is in contact with its environment trough its senses…”, a way, roughly quoting Jacob von Uexkuell, that has the species to develop an interpretation of the world). We adapt also by organizing and developing networks. Pépinières will present by shortly, in the beginning of 2011, an interactive tool that will change profoundly the access to mobility, namely a community platform to facilitate and promote it. It is a kind of social network mainly devoted to artists, creators, cultural, social and economic actors. May be a little bit unconsciously we are ‘Technoethically’ sensible to the evolution and changes in the art fields and languages, to the inter and trans- disciplinary approaches and, with a more personal nearly “Calvinistic remark”, to the significance of one’s labours in every day life. |
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| 12.00 | Presentation | Francesco Monico | Forewords of a Subversive Technopoetic: for a libertarian pedartgogy - Technology, Art, Research a pragmatic knowledge |
| What follows is a research project I have conducted from 2004 to 2010. It originates in the process of founding and directing the School of Media Design & Multimedia Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Italy where I hold the chair in Theory and Method of the Mass Media. I have designed and directed this school as a device of pedagogical research, with the aim of being able to concentrate on those cultures and forms of knowledge traditional academic institutions seemed to overlook. This research is based on a praxis, an artistic modus operandi that calls for a pragmatic method of teaching and study, combining this artistic praxis with purposeful speculation. The praxis coincides with the application of an artistic operation that puts the accent, as a phenomenon of pure immanence, on the will and meaning connected with artistic creation and its appreciation. In fact, in the era of the supremacy of technique, in which the generations can experience its effects in real time, art seems to change its quality and become one of the favored tools of observation and exploration of the world. It was Joseph Kosuth (USA, 1945), in his works and writings, who triggered this research, stating that art begins where mere material existence leaves off: art possesses a straightforwardly conceptual nature. Not that this is anything new. In classical Greece the artist-poet dwelled in the debate on techné-poiesis. In the Renaissance Leonardo fused the figure of the artist with that of the engineer. The Naturphilosophie of Goethe and Schelling thrived on this fusion, and the modernist speculation of the 20th century imposed a confrontation with technique on the discussion of human culture, which would lead to a wider diffusion of art. Even today, however, it seems harder for artists to accept the idea that in the era of technique everyone is an artist than for scientists to accept the existence of a diffused science, a “crowd science” as it has been defined by Roger Malina, director of Leonardo ISAST, MIT Press. In fact, while science seems to be more open to interaction, the same cannot be said of mainstream art, which attempts to defend its positions of 'uniqueness' and 'elite otherness', an undertaking that seems to have lost credibility, at this point, and can only be sustained by the aura of financial value. There are probably other causes; it might be the economic system of art, interwoven with the history of the postwar 20th century, where artistic speculation crosses the major socio-political oppositions and leads the winners to exalt this vision of art not only as an 'aesthetic and cultural factor' but also as a true celebration of power. The context of art also exists as an environment of social and cultural relations, making it possible to think that art wants to take responsibility for the meaning of community life, and thus aspires to a credibility gauged by its own civil commitment. Technique seems to succumb to this vision, aligning itself with a critical rejection that reaches its height in the technological expressions of the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, and in the movement against the war in Vietnam in the 1970s, while philosophy takes an increasing distance from any contamination. So who comes to grips with the thought of the contemporary condition of innovation? Art? |
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| 12.20 | Presentation | Gabriela Galati | Theater of Memory & Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas as Archive Models for the (Virtual) Conservation and Communication of Knowledge |
| This presentation will advance an overview on the interest of the Theatre of Memory by Giulio Camilo (1480-1544) and of Aby Warburg's (1866- 1929) Mnemosyne Atlas project as antecedent models for conceptualizing and understanding the actual World Wide Web as a system for the archival and transmission of knowledge and for the conservation of memory. If so far, first oral and then written culture were the privileged vehicles for this transmission, could it be proposed that the Web is becoming the next one? The word education has several definitions today and can be understood in many different ways. In the present paper it is going to be understood as the transmission of knowledge in a broader sense and not necessarily in a systematic fashion, such as its first definition expresses. The ‘idea of the Theatre’ was fundamentally a structure of conceptual relationships rather than an actual building that Camillo understood as a spatial representation of chronology. L ’Idea del Theatro deals with “the eternal aspect of all things” in a book that is organized in seven sections that map the creation of the world. In Camillo’s system the scholars (the “users” of the theatre) become spectators. His conception of the Theatre is in its original sense, “a place where a spectacle unfolds: Following the order of the creation of the world, we shall place on the first levels the more natural things…” Above all, Camillo thought the Theater as the ideal of pedagogy: the ideas and memories it would trigger would be for the education of the spirit above all. Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne project is centered on images: a figurative atlas composed by more that two thousand plates; each plate is formed by photomontages on wooden boards that bring reproductions of different works, specially form the Renaissance but also archeological repertoire and visual material from daily life, such as newspapers. The Atlas Mnemosyne is aimed to create relations and bring memories in rapport to each other, not only in a linear, but also in a simultaneous and transversal fashion. Again, as in Camillo’s project, it is not a “narrative” model, but an open and more creative one in which the access to knowledge, and even more important, the triggering of ideas in the “user” of this scaffolding, can be “attacked” and accessed from different angles without the obligation of following a linear and unilateral path. Both models, as utopian projects as they might be considered, and also so separated in time, share incredible and almost predictive similarities with the actual Web, where the possibility of accessing knowledge has an analogous “shape” even if the materiality of the support is different for obvious reasons. This fact opens the door to a proposal of a possible non-linear model when thinking on “the history of art”, on “the history and theory of new media”, and on the transmission, conservation and archival of new media works and of knowledge in general. |
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| 12.40 | Presentation | Jennifer Kanary | Art and Research, an innovative education Honours Programme that supports future art science collaborations |
| In recent years art education programmes have shifted into the realm of knowledge economies in which certain art practice's are regarded as a creative form of knowledge production. The more we learn about the social and economical values of such knowledge productions the more Masters and Ph.D. artistic research programmes seem to appear all over the world. In order to address their pertinent research questions the researcher artists that enter such programmes often find themselves in complex trans-disciplinary structures for which collaborative and organisational skills are imperative. Too often a lack of these skills get in the way of successful research practices. This sets a challenge for bachelor education curricula. How to prepare artists and scientists for future collaborations? How to develop a curriculum that facilitates these Master and Ph.D. programmes of artistic research? By bringing talented students from the University of Amsterdam and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie together in the experimental honours programme Art and Research we allow for early insights and hands on experience with the values and pitfalls of art-science collaborations. In this presentation I will give a summary of how Art and Research addresses such issues and present some of it's successful case studies that illustrate the value of such research strategies and the need for more focus on artistic research educational structures on the Bachelor level. |
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| 13.00 | Presentation | Jaromil | Design patterns between Free Software and Permaculture |
| 13.20 | Lunch break | ||
| 14.50 | Presentation | Dimitri Chimenti | Notes for a rhetorical typology: grafts, drawings and inserts in Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah |
| This paper attempts to delineate a taxonomy, to make sense of the continuous overlapping and re-bidding between the textual and the extra-textual fields at stake in Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano. The aim is both to clarify how this novel takes up a liminal literary position and to deepen our understanding of its own peculiar form of realism. The notion of realism in this context refers less to a stylistic construct according to specific compositional codes than to a ‘textualization of the real’, wherein reality presents itself within the texts through a system of references external to the text itself. |
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| 15.10 | Presentation | Patrizia Moschella | The paradox of plenty |
| The following text was written as part of a report at a conference held at the Collegio di Milano (see note) on the 25th November 2010, where, with, Nando Dalla Chiesa we presented an interdisciplinary project dedicated to the relationship between art, communication and sociology of organized crime that will involve communication design students in NABA and Sociology of Political Science students in the current academic year. Given the complexity of the issue that will be developed with students in a semester course, I adopted the case of Saviano (author of the famous novel Gomorra), not just to ride the wave of the media phenomenon, already fully exploited, attaching its audience to something simple and popular, but rather to present the contemporary media context in which all information on organised crime occurs, and what makes the Saviano a case in point. The paper presented here is twofold. It first puts emphasis on the ability of the new media to create diverse and fragmented social representations, although interconnected and capable of capillary penetration of unimaginable effect. It allows me then to propose an experimental method of observation of the phenomenon that refers to hermeneutics as an interpretative tool capable of decoding the various layers of media, and the narrative structures which characterise the flow of communication. Those same structures that the market will quickly translate into consumer products and manipulative promotional material by creating an anti-mafia subculture. |
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| 15.30 | Presentation | Fahrettin Ersin Alaca | A Management Theory for Art Education: Fuzzy Front End for Independent Progress |
| Business and design are intertwined and pervasive through their dimensions, concepts, and terminology. The priorities of the contemporary agenda put design in an intellectual and so ‐ called ethical context regarding sustainability, which facilitates the penetration of rational and utilitarian aspects of design into the spiritual and inspirational ethos of art. The ever ‐ increasing pace of life and consumption have turned today’s designers to agents contributing to cultural, economic, and social mobility of the entire global population. Since design embraces today a more abstracted, personal, and so ‐ called ethical level, it is becoming more difficult to distinguish the blurry borders between design and art. Inevitably not only new media art, but also multiple aspects of overall art and art education are under the stress of transformation due to the expansion of design. Under these conditions, the question comes to foreground, how art and its educational practices should be managed in order to strengthen their independent progress. At this point, formatting a methodology requires a number of innovative aspects due to the set of complex phenomena stated above. Moreover, art education must deal in a systematic way with the increasing need for the fast and efficient transmission of knowledge. This paper attempts to make a modest contribution to the development of the system structure not only redefining the roles of the stakeholders of the contemporary art education, but also enhancing the productive realm of the artistic curricula and the sequence of educational activities. The focal point of this paper encapsulates the proposal which uses the managerial and practical tools of business and design instead of establishing a competence between design and art. In other words, the paper engages business and design lexicon to develop future strategies for an art education system liberated from business’ constraints. Adapting the fuzzy front end innovation process stage and constructivist design approaches allowing the active participation of stakeholders serve as a unique and multidisciplinary tool challenging the existing habits shaping educational structure. | |||
| 15.50 | Presentation | Emanuela Patti | “We are a dream in a dream”. The illusion of reality analyzed in film narration |
| Drawing on Pasolini’s quote in Che cosa sono le nuvole (1967), “We are a dream in a dream”, this paper will explore how recent cinematic fiction has challenged the illusion of reality in an era where we know that the material world we experience through our senses is a representation of quantum phenomena. The main question addressed is how film narratives - examples will include Nirvana (Salvatores, 1997), The Truman Show (Weir, 1998), The Matrix trilogy (the Wackosky brothers, 1999-2003) and Waking Life (Linklater, 2001-, as a second level of representation of reality, problematize the boundaries between fictional reality and real fiction. Assuming that cinematic fiction can be employed as a way to critically deconstruct first, and then reframe, our representation, therefore our consciousness of the Real (Žižek), the films considered will be employed as a pre-text to critically discuss the concepts of Real, Unreal and Hyperreal from an epistemological point of view. I shall explore how the topic of reality as an illusion has been treated in film representation in relation to Plato’s allegory of the cave through McLuhan to Jacques Baudrillard's idea of “material illusion” and Slavoj Žižek’s reflections on the “desert of the Real”. |
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| 16.10 | Coffee break | ||
| 16.30 | Presentation | Viola Lilith Russi | Fondazione D'Ars: experimental experiences in promoting new media art |
| The mission of Fondazione D’Ars Oscar Signorini onlus is to support and promote the most advanced artistic researches in the hand of young artists. In the last few years the Foundation is engaged in the field of new media art, through three different kind of events, always between education and research, pedagogy and experimentation: - Milano in digitale: a platform of projects like contests, exhibitions, publications, debats, around practical and theoretical contemporary new media art researches of young artists. -Meltingpot: an experimental experience of a laboratory for students who propose their new media art project to be supported, realized and exhibit. - D’ARS magazine section New horizons: directed by Pier Luigi Capucci, it explores new frontiers among art science and technologies. |
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| 16.50 | Presentation | Luca Carrubba | Code, cartography and relational learning |
| In the encounter between dataflow, live coding and cartography will high light the emergence of a new approach in learning digital art. The need to manage this wealth of information in always more effective ways have determined the centrality of software in the cultural domain by creating a de facto "data hyper democracy” in which the media disappears and everything is translated into code. Among the necessary conditions that have made that possible free software, also knows as FLOSS, is one of this. FLOSS has first made evident the cultural and ethical inherent in the production of software, making of it a political campaign and generating the technical and political context in which different artists, researchers, hackers were able to freely experiment with different degrees of manipulation of digital data. During this experimental season have been developed educational methods (and only after production methods) that have the ability to maintain different levels of abstraction simultaneously: graphical programming languages based on dataflow paradigm. This approach allows developer to draw the software and then transform the conceptual diagram in code that, in the form of visual blocks are connected to each other through a relational logic. The logic diagram that follows does not distinguish between the physical world and data information and it seems to organize the incoming and outgoing information and process similar to what a mind map does. It is precisely in the approach to a relational mapping method, where the concepts and actions are correlated with each other in a visual way, just by giving priority to the relations between actors, it's possible to get good results both in terms of accessibility of computer science as of learning skills. Learning skills related to the possibility, entirely contemporary, to better understand the socio/ technology process behind the technology it self. If today digital knowledge is considered of strategic importance for advanced industrial cultures, it may not be considered just as the ability to handle procedures of a given computer program. It should be considered as a process of understanding what goes on behind a computer. Putting together this approaches it's possible to imagine a different way to teach digital arts: where the market needs of know how to do a specific operation (learn a software) can cohabit together whit a understanding of what happen behind and more over the operation it self. |
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| 17.10 | Presentation | Mario Canali | HOMO RIDENS |
| Bizarrely evolution has provided human beings with the exclusive ability to laugh. The phenomenon of laughing is both physical and mental: a possible interpretation is that laughter is the signal that a break, a stumble, a reversal suddenly occurred. Laughter can also be read as a symptom, very noisy, physical, that a recognition, an understanding, a light has suddenly crossed our minds. The perspective of laughter can offer interesting ideas for a vision of the contemporary, of art and of communication. |
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| 17.30 | Presentation | Roger Malina | |
| 17.50 | Break | ||
| 18.10 | Panel | Francesco Monico | Roy Ascott, Derrick de Kerckhove, Roger Malina, Siegfried Zielinski |
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