[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 the creation
'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.

Before working 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 music 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. We
just received feedback related to questions about technological determinism
that we posed in these tapes a month ago, which was peculiar since the
project had been dormant since 1999.

Another crucial theoretical influence is the Brazilian philosopher Vilem
Flusser. He distinguishes discourse from dialogue. In my reading of
Flusser-- discourse is a unilateral transmission of information, 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
that inspired the move from lecturer to facilitator in much of 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 with Steve Dietz about new terminology for emerging
cultural forms several years ago I was inspired  by Hakim Bey¹s idea of the
ŒTemporary Autonomous Zone¹ (TAZ). Here, several 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 to facilitate better
understanding. I am arguing for temporary intellectual zones spinning off
Hakim Bay's notion of the TAZ. 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 addressed media literacy that encompasses multiple channels of media
transmission/ communication. 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 private sector
universities such as the University of Phoenix and Capella University seem
to be on the forefront of 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 the facilitation of team-centered learning. This model follows
a move from the hierarchical top-down approach to a more distributed one.
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. 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, even
with upper-end systems like that the prices are dropping. 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. Blogging technology is starting to be adopted
in the classroom. Based on this use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news
aggregators in combination with MP3 attachments (and soon video, I am sure)
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 I am
opposed to technological determinism, but I do 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 be maintained. The
question regarding the gatekeepers of knowledge then comes up vis-à-vis
authority and legitimacy and regulation of information. 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.