[iDC] sharing "new media" curricula/potentials

Sun Jan 21 18:44:06 EST 2007

Hello all,
Thanks for the introduction to this active list Trebor!
I¹ve been lurking and finally have a moment to chip in.
Thanks to Margaret for the great moderation of the praxis-based PhDs and to
Tiffany for moderating this round.

A quick introduction, I am a ³new media² / intermedia artist to explore the
political, social and economic trends of contemporary culture.
My most recent project is called ³Exchange² and involved driving around
Canada and the United States in a semi-truck will all my personal belongings
tagged with RFID microchips.....
I graduated from CalArts and I teach in Digital Arts  at The University of
British Columbia in Vancouver.

Apart from the difficulties in naming this diverse and evolving area, ³new
media² seems to be the most common title, and Tiffany gets right to the
point with identifying both interdisciplinarity and community as issues in
this area. It might also be worthwhile to consider the various ways new
media is used 1) as tool  2) as medium  3) as a filter -
cultural/political/economic  4) as venue (on-line environments)  5) as sites
of collaboration
6) as community etc etc.

Interdisciplinarity  what do we mean? I am currently co-teaching an
interdisciplinary, or perhaps cross-disciplinary, course for the creative
arts. It includes students from the departments of film, music, theatre,
creative writing and digital arts. The idea is to try to overcome some of
the difficulties that seem to emerge in interdisciplinary collaboration. We
are striving to familiarize the students with different ways of working,
with the different languages specific to the individual disciplines, with
the ability to better engage with one another in a truly collaborative way.
The hurdles with interdisciplinary work only increase with the
creative/technical/language differences of more diverse disciplines.

Community  in academic environments, sharing is typically seen as
disadvantageous to the student  ie. Increases competition for top grades.
Some of my colleagues and I have been working hard to promote the idea of
community both within a digital art cohort and between the digital arts and
the more traditional artistic media. Within the digital arts students seem
better able to engage in more open sourc-esque peer
teaching/learning/creating, but is isn¹t yet transferring well to the
department as a whole. Perhaps it reflects the need to be more open-sourced,
collaborative etc. within new media. The new media creations we see in
museums (when we see them), at conferences and festivals etc are often
large, complex and tremendously costly. They are often next to impossible to
create as an individual artist ³in the studio². Artists working with new
media frequently rely on various forms of expertise to complement their own
ie. Programmers, electronics specialists, etc. The practice of artists
hiring help is certainly not new, but having the ability to hire experts is
very different from collaborative and truly interdisciplinary practice.

As an observation, it appears that one trend is the re-embodiment of new
media art. There is a trend away from work exclusively on the net, on the
screen, toward work that re-occupies a physical space(s) - comes back out of
the box. This may result in some dissolution of the isolation of the new
media artist...?

As far as literacy, I am not certain that the need for this is any different
than for the more traditional media. Artists need to be literate  of what
is really the question. Over the last decade there has been a significant
increase in Œnew media theory¹, but what is still emerging is the new
generations for whom this technology is in no way new. This is not to
suggest that there is any greater intellectual understanding of the media,
but rather that there are young creators who will have un-imagined uses and
approaches to using it. As educators, how do we, or is it necessary that we
try to maintain the guise that we understand the media better/ that we can
teach them about something as naturalized to their lives as computers.
Perhaps the best that we have to offer is in the area of literacy  of
historical context, of social and cultural studies, of remembering
(ourselves) that new media is not new, that new media is already not
separate from culture, from art, from politics, from life....

Ok, this was written on the fly... Some ideas that have been swimming
between my neurons! It may offer one response to some of Tiffany¹s questions
and may add to the discussion.

Thanks,
Nancy

-- 
Nancy Nisbet
Assistant Professor

Dept Art History & Visual Art
The University of British Columbia
#403, 6333 Memorial Road
Vancouver, BC V6T1Z2
Canada

office: +1-604-822-8727
nnisbet at interchange.ubc.ca
Www.exchangeproject.ca
Www.ahva.ubc.ca/nisbet

On 1/20/07 7:58 PM, "Tiffany Holmes" <tholme at artic.edu> wrote:

> Dear all, 
> 
> Trebor has invited me to moderate a discussion related to new media and
> education.  
> 
> I'd like to try to pick up on some of the exciting conversation that Margaret
> Morse and others generated about the relevance of practice-based PhDs in the
> new media field.  The topic I hope to explore is the potential of the nebulous
> arena of "new media" to generate a truly interdisciplinary undergraduate or
> MFA-level curriculum---one that promotes community and participation across
> campus.  
> 
> New media is a nomadic discipline that has invaded communication departments,
> trickled into photography departments, swirled through film and video
> curriculums, and has now begun a slow infiltration of the sculpture, fiber,
> painting, and design areas too, as well as many other disciplines.   As Grant
> Kester recently pointed out, new media is "the most intensively capitalized
> art movement in the history of modernism."  That said, given the rapid
> expansion of new media departments what standards, or criteria are there among
> faculty to define the guiding curricula and community focus?  
> 
> For incoming MFA students, a "Department of New Media," is often advertised as
> an interdisciplinary arena.  Yet, once those prospective students arrive on
> campus to study in the "Department of New Media", those individuals feel
> isolated and potentially disconnected from the group of students pursuing more
> established practices in fine arts or those pursuing professional degrees in
> engineering and the like.  Margaret Morse actually alluded to this earlier:
> "Contemporary grad students of new media 'working on the cusp of
> leisure/pleasure' spend hours and hours in pursuits that have few concrete
> outcomes suggests that there is something about the subject of new media
> itself that may be more fragmentizing and elusively virtual."
> 
> I'm curious share ideas with IDC listers who have built or participated in new
> media degree programs recently.  Here are just a few questions to start out
> with:
> 
> How do your new media programs relate to the campus at large---at
> universities, art schools, smaller institutions?  
> 
> Are there isolationist tendencies in the new media programs?  Are IDC listers
> enrolled or teaching in "new media-related" programs that have defined goals
> to create community/interdisciplinary collaboration---as well as teach
> programming and all the "software" skills?
> 
> What should students studying "new media" be learning?  Is there a "literacy"
> in the field that could be identified?  Would it help the discipline of "new
> media" to have defined competencies at the undergraduate and graduate level?  
> 
> I look forward to sharing conversation and ideas over the next week.
> 
> Best, Tiff
>  
> ____________________________________
> Tiffany Holmes, Associate Professor
> Chair, Department of Art and Technology Studies
> The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
> 112 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60603
> Phone: 312-345-3760,  Fax: 312-345-3565
> Mobile: 312-493-0302
> http://www.tiffanyholmes.com
> http://ecoviz.org
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 
> 
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