#pgdip

New-Media Art Education and Its Discontents Author(s): Trebor Scholz

Reviewed work(s): Source: Art Journal, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Spring, 2005), pp. 95-108 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068369 .

Accessed: 19/04/2012 17:40

New media art education and its discontents 

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hese topics were discussed on a preparatory online forum, and selected postings were included in a free conference publication.

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New media art education and its discontents 

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Christoph Spehr, who coined the term "free cooperation"

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ecome increasingly important. Recent versions of proprietary software, such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver, focus on the development of file sharing

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the Critical Mass and Reclaim the Streets movements present promising cooperative group models. During the antiwar protests of 2003,

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aper Tiger TV,

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ew York City-based chamber orchestra Orpheus works without a conduc tor, rotating all artistic and administrative functions among the musicians. These are examples of horizontal, leaderless social structures.

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articipate. ActiveClass permits students to silently ask questions, share responses, and provide other types of feedback. The results are compiled and then broadcast to all the students and the teacher, facilitating verbal discussion.s

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In free cooperation, everyone stands to benefit, and anyone can leave at any time. If there are disagreements, the cooperation must remain workable. There is no ideal cooperation; there always is compromise.

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t best, collaborations can playfully spark off one another, with a "third body" resulting from a chorus.7

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he logic of the art world and that of technology-based art are opposed to each other. T

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New media art education and its discontents 

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arly projects of collaborative authorship include Robert Adrian X's Die Welt in 24 Stunden (1983), Douglas Davis's The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994), and the project Epreuves d'?critures, part of the 198c exhibition Les Immatrieux conceived by Jean-Francois Lyotard. In spite of these examples and the interest of artists, most art institutions are neither interested in nor supportive of free cooperation. The Conference People love conferences. They are venues where you can reflect, rethink, meet future collaborators, debate ideas and artworks, party intensely, get inspired or provoked, learn, make new friends, and then occasionally carry on the debate in the sauna. They allow people who can't otherwise meet to spend a few days together (away from their obligations) and zoom in on ideas. For practitioners whose geographic location or financial situation makes access to these venues impossible, technologies such as video conferencing and Access Grid allow remote participation.9 Lovink and I suggest in a recent essay that the ritualized academic structure of panels and the essentially noncommunicative form of the keynote speech feed 97 art journal 6. The "tit-for-tat strategy" in Open Source devel opment is described in Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark, "The Architecture of Cooperation: Does Code Architecture Mitigate Free Riding in

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anelism is part of the dark side of'academism' and needs to be addressed, exactly because it is spilling over to other contexts such as the arts, culture, new media, and even activism."10

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ncreasingly, formats of the sciences are unnecessarily imposed on the arts, driven by the business logic of many universities that will acknowledge an art project as fundable if it affirms scientific formats of research.

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ametags contain information that makes the person locatable in a clos

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ollaborative Weblog Discordia, and dozens of e-mails.I4

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ndividuals who have the actual experience of the here-and-now-ness of teaching in the classroom and others who approach teaching with the there - and-then-ness of ideas they did not get a chance to test-drive with students.

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niversities throughout the United States increasingly are restructured to fit the imperatives of corporate business logic. In his book The University in Ruins, Bill Readings elaborates

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It is the task of the faculty to outline clearly what the interests of the department are and where the education provided will get the students professionally. Amy

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nce you work full-time, for a while, you'll realize how amazingly unfulfilling jobs are, and that you'll want an engagement with culture outside of your employment.",6

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Increasing bureaucratic demands in many universities diminish the time artist-educators have to actively engage with contemporary cultural production and discourse.

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Students rarely aspire to become artists and focus on acquiring vocational skills for their work in "the industry." They challenge the relevance of media archaeology,

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and politi cal context as concerns of an unfashionable past.

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Job opportunities drift from the VJ turntable and virtual reality lab to the local nonprofit organization and the theater stage.

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anthology Steal This University, Ana Marie Cox talks of the corporate desire for "just-in-time-knowledge"?that is, skills necessary for the job at hand, rather than basic, broader skills. As an example,

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consumer approach to education nurtures anti intellectualism, which manifests itself in neglecting assignments, complaining about workloads, or con demning intellectual debate as boring or irrelevant.

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as the time come when we can replace all proprietary software with Open Source or free software applications? Which tools can we easily use to network student groups, departments, and universities? How can we introduce wireless technologies for teaching? How can theory and production be brought together in a meaningful way?

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e need to allow for less efficiency, more play, and more experi mentation.

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ore attention should be paid to the building of friendships, relationships among peers, and interpersonal skills. Ergonomie chairs and healthy food (rare to find on U.S. campuses) would also contribute to a good learning environment.

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reie Klasse (free class) model of the Berlin University of the Arts, par ticipants should organize courses in which they teach each other, write their own curriculum, and invite speakers of their choice. W

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the university is a confedera tion of people of different ages, classes, genders, sexualities, and ethnicities. Yet the benches of new-media arts classrooms in the United States are often filled with young, Caucasian males. One reason is that most teachers are themselves white and male. I believe that, for the most part, it will be minority teachers who attract minority students. Focused recruitment in high schools is another possible approach to end this imbalance.

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oday, in the context of state budget cuts, self-organized do-it-yourself educational projects such as the Commune des Arts, the Freie Klasse, and the School for Missing Studies offer inspiring approaches.

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e should not focus on teaching technical skills alone. The cybertriumphalism that leads to "an exclusive emphasis on software programs is extremely problematic,

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ultural practices drive technical developments.23

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ays in an e-mail interview that in the last year, since the advent of Apple's Isight, he has begun to invite colleagues from the East Coast and Europe to "attend" end-of-the-semester critiques. This has worked surpris ingly well: students get one-on-one or two-on-one critiques with the virtual vis itors via two-way Web cam. For Sack, Isight is the first Web cam that "works well enough to support this kind of extended, distributed dialogue."26 He thinks it 104 SPRING 2005 23. Geert Lovink, My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (Rotterdam: NAi,

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o the theorists like Michel Foucault, PaulVirilio.Vannevar Bush, and Jacques Derrida, we can add, for example, the rich collection of per spectives offered in Noah Wardip-Fruin and Nick Montfort's New Media Reader.34

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edicated new-media arts educators have to work harder than many of their colleagues in other departments due to the fast-paced changes in the field.

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is 106 SPRING 2005 32. Interview with Ralf Homann by the author, October 2004, available online at http://distrib utedcreativity.typepad.com/idc/2004/12/inter view_with_I .html. 33. Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors (London: Routledge, 2003). 34. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 35. Anna Harding, "Artist?Curator?Audience: Relationships and Curating," in Education Inform ation Entertainment, 74-81 36. For more on DLP, see http://dlp.distributed

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It is a situ ated tool for learning communities to create, find, edit, reuse, and share content in new media. The DLP is a Web-based, collaborative, educational project that is 106 SPRING 2005 32. Interview with Ralf Homann by the author, October 2004, available online at http://distrib utedcreativity.typepad.com/idc/2004/12/inter view_with_I .html. 33. Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors (London: Routledge, 2003). 34. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds., The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 35. Anna Harding, "Artist?Curator?Audience: Relationships and Curating," in Education Inform ation Entertainment, 74-81 36. For more on DLP, see http://dlp.distributed

Link

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The article I have choosen is:

Does Lara croft wear fake polygons? 

An interesting title, which I believe, hints at the core debate within the journal; does a female character in a first person shoot’em up game transgress the objectification of women commonly embodied by the standard media by offering the gamer a new subjective position, that of the female character.

Published in 2001

I know the article is touch out of date but this is part of what drew me to review it. In the second paragraph Anne Marie states –

“Through the mid-1990s, postmodern and feminist theoreticians, art-and-technology critics and even popular-culture critics largely ignored the increasing popularity of computer games, lending their attention instead to the Web or to the considerably less ubiquitous, less tangible technology of virtual reality.”

  This article was published at a time when theoreticians were only just beginning to direct their analytical eye over the philosophical values of gaming. She also mentions very briefly about the pedagogical values of gaming and how this may have devalued the area of study in some way. I am extremely interested in the values of “gameification” which has been around for a very long time but recently has had a burst of interest with websites such as:

Khan academy & Code academy

Just in case you have not come across “gameification” yet Wikipedia’s definition states that

“Gamification is the use of game design techniques[1], game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. “

Sites like khan academy encourage users to learn by offering them new virtual badges. More interestingly users can gain more rewards for helping others to complete the tasks that they have already completed. This is an area that I would really like to investigate as a leveller between the genders when it comes to teaching creative computing.

My research so far has mainly focused on the gender bias within education looking into statistics for enrolment of courses, success rates and retention. This is only a minute facet of the area I am interested in. My curiosity meanders amongst thoughts such as at what point in a child’s life, if at all does the humble computer assume a gender bias or does ubiquitous computing encourage a more balanced take up of technology. These questions pose a more qualitive /philosophical debate which maybe interests me more than the quantitive.

 A pivotal quote from this article is “computer games are now socializing the younger generations of post-industrial citizens”. I wonder, how does this affect pedagogy? Is this something that we should be cautious of or embrace as a valuable tool? If there is an imbalance of boys vs. girls learning to socialise through computer games is this apparent in the class room?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk

In a ted talk from 2011 Salman Khan suggests that the social impact of gamification could eventually lead to a one-world classroom reminiscent of McLuhan’s global village.

She goes on to say “The actions occurring in this first widely implemented form of 3D game space are not virtual adaptations of everyday social relations, as predicted by early cyberpunk novelists”. I am intrigued to know at what level this hypothesis is still true over 10 years later.  Second life has gone a long way to counteract that lack of a social virtual environment but the vide I get from the students is that its not as engaging as 2d social environments such as facebook and twitter.

Anne makes an astute observation that before Lara croft, the majority of female gaming characters were destined to be the helpless victims whose only role was to passively wait to be saved the heroic male character. Could this be a factor, which tips technology in the favour of the male?

I really enjoyed the way in which Anne broke the subject position off users gaming as Lara croft in to 5 different categories though I am sure there are more variants.

·      Lara as female Frankenstein monster

·      Lara as drag queen

·      Lara as Dominatrix, Femme Fatale

·      Lara as positive role model

·      Lara as a vehicle for the queer female gaze

I find it slightly amusing that in the sub category “Lara as female Frankenstein monster” Anne mentions that a programmer somewhere has written a patch, which removes Lara’s clothes. Half of me is impressed that maybe a young lad out there somewhere learnt to program for the very purpose of disrobing the very a sexual frame of a women constructed completely of triangles. Of course I could be wrong, there is no reason why the programmer had to be male but we will get to that in the sub category “Lara as a vehicle for the queer female gaze”.

I really enjoy Anne’s rejection of the notion that Lara is the embodiment of an unrealistic female form designed and coded to be controlled by a male like in so many sci-fi novels. Under the sub-heading of “Lara as drag queen” she explores the gamers subject position. She postulates that rather than the gamer assuming the role of puppet masters separate and cut off from the character, a gamer may immerse themselves in their avatars role of heroin, caught up in the gameplay. This could be considered a form of cross-dressing. Anne uses the term “wearing a feminine identity” and compares this to the well know phenomenon of gender experimentation / crossing in online forums and chat rooms. The anonymity of which these environments allow could be a valuable asset in pedagogy for accessing students who aren’t confident enough to engage in class debate.

I love the reference to Sandy Stone where Anne talks about our virtual identities as not being separate, manufactured fakes of how we want to be portrayed but instead a truth that goes beyond the real into our subconscious. My favourite quote here is

“Stone perceives these multiple personas as extensions of the many different roles we play on- and off-line, part and parcel of the natural condition of schizophrenia that we all inhabit”

Anne is very transparent when referring to her own research. I foresee some similar problems when it comes to my research when it comes to students feeling comfortable enough to answer my questions honestly. Towards the end of the “Lara as drag queen” section discloses, “none of the players who responded to my survey were willing to admit to a cross-dressing relationship with Lara”.

The “Lara as Dominatrix, Femme Fatale” section was short and astute but had nothing of any interest to my research.

In the section Lara as positive role model the question arries:

Can a female protagonist such as Lara Croft, whose assertive, non-submissive game play depicts a woman of super human ability physically and mentally, be a good role model for young female gamers? Anne flags up the notion that perhaps

Female gamers may feel at ease embodying an aspirational character, which in turn may encourage them to start shaping the way in which games develop this may lead to an influx of female developers in the programming industry.

Traditionally, games designed for female gamers have been very non-confrontational. Anne lists games such as Barbie & Ms Pacman in comparison with Lara Croft then poses the question, which is the best role model? In terms of teaching in a creative computing environment, aspirations towards a driven, intelligent female character would be highly beneficial in female students. Anne also claims “Game play itself is an important pedagogical tool as a prime motivator for boys to learn computer skills” which is definitely something that I have experienced in code workshops. She stresses the importance that female students don’t get left behind in the larger information sector that will be increasingly tied into an "education" in gaming/computer-geek     culture. This is insanely astute when you consider the present educational situation and the fact this journal was written 10 years ago.

The section entitled “Lara as a Vehicle for the Queer Female Gaze” is an interesting subject position but most of it is irrelevant in terms of my research proposal. It definitely touches on subject matter that is out of the scope of this project.

Conclusion