[iDC] Interview with Patrick Lichty

[Trebor Scholz]

Reflections on Schemas of New Media-Based Educational Models

Interview with Patrick Lichty (adjusted by Trebor Scholz)
As part of WebCamTalk1.0
http://www.newmediaeducation.org
 
Trebor Scholz: Who influenced your thinking about new-media art education?

Patrick Lichty: Henry Giroux¹s ideas on radical pedagogy influenced me a
great deal in terms of electronic communication in education. Although
Giroux has not addressed new media per se, his thoughts on radical pedagogy
as agent of social change have had an influence in terms of activist
writings and media tactics. In this day and age when our rights to free
speech are being imposed upon so badly, one must engage in media tactics in
order to get a full range of ideas across.

What we see in the current mass media is what I would call 'tactical
reality,' which is a highly subjective (or speculative), ideological form of
reality that gets replicated until it reaches a point of mass acceptance.
The question remains: Who shapes this information? Accuracy in reporting and
accountability might have evaporated a long time ago, but these issues
absolutely belong on the table of the new media educator. Earlier than any
work with groups like The Yes Men, I was a member of a subversive pedagogy
group called Haymarket Riot. My colleague Jon Epstein and I created
multimedia and a series of rock videos that dealt with postmodern sociology,
similar to the old 'Schoolhouse Rock' genre but with a hard industrial track
and 3D computer graphics. It had two purposes­- first, it was intended to
test our theories on multimodal learning in light of early 90s media
culture. And secondly, it got our message into the classroom. We distributed
the tapes widely across universities in the United States. A few students
remember the questions about technological determinism that we posed in
those tapes today. We just received feedback about these tapes a month ago
which was peculiar since the project had been dormant since1999.

Another crucial theoretical influence is my interpretation of the Brazilian
philosopher Vilem Flusser, who distinguishes discourse from dialogue. In my
reading of Flusser regarding discourse and dialogue-- discourse is a
unilateral transmission of information, hopefully building on prior
dialogues. Conversely, dialogue is a multilateral exchange of ideas. Under
this model, dialogue should generate more information and knowledge; it is a
seed generator and feedback machine. The idea is that through the much more
distributed/less hierarchical exchange of information there is the
possibility for greater generation of ideas. Perhaps this is the principle
behind the move from lecturer to facilitator in academia.

TS: Recently, there was an increased interest in notions of
self-institutionalization, so called anti-universities, and 'free
universities.' What can the self-contained institutional apparatus of the
university learn from these 'collaboratories'?

PL: From a conversation I had with Steve Dietz several years ago on new
terms for emerging cultural forms, I have liked to play off of Hakim Bey¹s
idea of the ŒTemporary Autonomous Zone¹ in which individuals agree to create
a brief social compact for a common aim. In Bey¹s case, it refers to
temporary communities like Burning Man, but in my conversation with Dietz
(the Temporary Autonomous Taxonomy) my thought was to create ad hoc
vocabularies for a given cultural situation for better understanding. I am
arguing for temporary intellectual zones spinning off Hakim Bay. In this
case, I am thinking of a ŒTemporary Intellectual Zone¹ in which groups might
be able to create and exchange bodies of knowledge that can keep up with the
rapid change of technoculture. These zones can address niche cultures that
are so small that institutional organs like journals would not take notice.
I am arguing for media such as micro- or on-demand journals, and communal
electronic media like Wikipedia. These micro-institutions can manage rapidly
changing aspects of culture while maintaining some legitimating functions to
ensure the accuracy of their content.   

In 'Speaking the Multimedia Culture' (University of Maryland, College Park;
1996) I have spoken about media literacy that encompass multiple channels of
media transmission/communication in which contemporary culture talks through
media and metaphors across many more channels of information than ever
before. Although this is not directly analogous to the Temporary
Intellectual Zone, one could translate this concept into the potential need
for expanded niche groups to address emerging social issues. At the same
time there is the danger to drown in a sea of information. The speed of
information creation and consumption could lead to a breakdown of the
ability to process it. At that point, the acceleration of cultural
production would perhaps lead to a form of Œinformation paralysis¹ far worse
than what we witness already. Useful responses to this problem include
information filters such as news aggregators for RSS feeds. 

TS: Do you think that the productive sites outside the university are
morphing faster than academia? A book in the academic publishing cycle, for
example, takes about two years to get published. Online you can insert your
contribution immediately into a peer-reviewed distributed debate.

PL: Absolutely. An unnerving aspect of culture is that the private sector
universities such as the University of Phoenix and Capella seem to be
pioneering much of the use of social software for learning, although much of
it simply relies on adapted news servers and Microsoft Outlook. Their
software is basic, but the systems under which they employ connectivity and
asynchronous learning have been developed by trial and error over a period
of years. The challenge in distributed learning is not technological but has
everything to do with the implementation into social systems.

As a related note, it is interesting to see the shift in pedagogy from
discursive to that of a team-centered learning facilitation approach. This
model follows a move from the hierarchical top-down approach to a more
distributed one in the classroom. This is another area where I am somewhat
uncertain, as the obvious influence of the private sector is obvious here,
but the team approach towards learning seems to have some real strengths. I
am curious about the long-term effects of this methodology.

http://www.uopxonline.com
http://www.capella.edu

There are other readily available technologies that can circumvent the usual
barriers of time and space so that students can get in contact with some of
the better thinkers of our time. For example, the use of a basic powerbook
and an iSight camera with a decent broadband connection allows for
conversation that was only available by teleconferencing before, and was not
feasible by webcam before. Products like this are not open source, and by no
means free, but at $125 for an iSight camera, one can get a lot of social
bandwidth. You can see and hear the person well, and it is easily
implemented-- it does not require an elite knowledge that technologies like
VR systems still require. However, the upper-end systems there are also
dropping in price. For example, an Access Grid node can be set up for less
than $25,000 using off-the-shelf parts. The Access Grid (AG) is an
open-source Internet 2 consortium of institutions, which have adopted a set
of multi-threaded audiovisual, and media net casting standards for
distributed information sharing.
In addition, there is an open-source Virtual Reality consortium called the
GeoWall that was originally based in Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
that is again using off-the-shelf resources to create more affordable
virtual reality resources. Here at Bowling Green State University, Gregory
Little and I are trying to develop distributed Virtual Reality environments
through which people will hopefully be able to collaborate. This will be
implemented by using common interfaces to examine sets of data, the most
common being terrains or avatar-based environments. 

http://www.apple.com/
http://www.accessgrid.org
http://www.geowall.org
http://art.bgsu.edu/~glittle/ars

Some of the other powerful emerging cooperative technologies include
podcasting and text messaging. On a recent visit to the Cleveland Institute
of Art, I noticed that their broadcast video class is using a blog for the
development of ideas for projects and for the logging of progress. Blogging
technology is starting to be adopted in the classroom. Based on this the use
of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news aggregators in combination with MP3
(and soon video, I am sure) attachments could create the ability to have
asynchronous models of lecturing for classes. In these models, the
aggregators could grab the media files, upload them to the user¹s personal
media device, and then deliver the content, to which the student could
respond via the blog or forum. As an educational model podcasting is
relatively simple. 

Texting and SMS are other media that look like good models for information
delivery. With urban legends in the media talking about kids texting on
their cell phones at speeds of up to 150 words per minute, they are rapidly
shooting a lot of information at each other. And while I was annoyed at
first when I saw it used by my students, I soon realized that if they are
using that social bandwidth so effectively then educators should bring it
into the classroom as well.

http://www.podcasting.net
http://www.engadget.com/entry/5843952395227141/
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/02/07/podcasting.ap/
http://www.lights.com/weblogs/rss.html

To sum up-- we are in a period of rapid technological change, and although I
am against technological determinism, I feel that educators need to be aware
and make use of the technological developments happening in the world of
their students. From the angle of knowledge creation, social networks as
generators of information and ideas have a lot of merit if there are models
in which the veracity of the information can somehow be maintained. The
question regarding the gatekeepers of knowledge then comes up vis-à-vis
authority and legitimacy of the information and who gets to regulate it. In
the classroom, the move from a top-down to a more horizontal /distributed,
facilitated form of learning seems to be increasingly accepted. I think the
most exciting part of network culture is the potential to get students
closer to relevant knowledge. There is much to consider and we are merely in
the process of sorting it out.

TS: Thank you for being with us today.

PL: Always my pleasure.


About:
Patrick Lichty is a technologically-based conceptual artist, writer,
independent curator, and Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine. He
has also collaborated as part of numerous collectives, including Terminal
Time, The Yes Men, Haymarket Riot, ScreenSavers, and others.