Education for the Morning After

Mapping New-Media Art Education

There is a crisis in new-media art education. Over the past ten

years new-media art programs have been started at universities
across North America, Europe and the United States. More
recently also China has opened media art departments and
similar developments take place in South Africa. Departments
and programs from the undergraduate up to the Ph.D. level are
shaped, many positions in this area open up and student interest
is considerable. At the same time technologists, artists and
educators acknowledge a crisis mode: from Germany to Canada,
Finland, South Africa, Australia, and Brazil to the United States
and beyond. But why do so many people who teach it hesitated
to have public debate about education in new media art? Despite
conference sessions at Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) in
Amsterdam, Multimedia Arts Asian Pacific 04 in Singapore, and
an introductory panel at Transmediale 05 in Berlin there has
been surprisingly little debate and literally no focused public
discussion on the specific issues facing new-media art education
in the United States.

There is no one-fits-all answer to the current crisis. Most visions

will have to be locally situated in order to become relevant. The
May 2005 conference "Share, Share Widely" (SSW) [1] and
many interviews with new media educators worldwide, show
many strikingly similar problems while also demonstrating
unmistakably different positions. In New York, the conference
participants confirmed the current crisis in new-media art
education. The mentioned interviews and in-depth entries on the
conference media blog echo this crisis.

For many educators the single most urgent point of contention is

the pull between vocational/industrialized training and a solid
critical education. Much of this debate is driven by the
corporatization of the university with its business logic of
"excellence." We go through a night of substance [Kittler,1989]
in much of media curriculum. There is a widespread ignorance of
media history, for example. Many educators pretend that new
media art somehow felt mysteriously out of the skies-- as if
there is no connection to the history of art, technology, culture
and society at large. In a recent interview Elizabeth Goodman,
artist, sometimes-teacher and researcher in Portland (Oregon),
describes how she links emerging cultural practices to their
backgrounds in the history of technology, and culture at large
she responded by pointing to "a tendency among the techno-
obsessed to think that ‘new media’ is somehow the product of a
catastrophic, unbridgeable break with older tools and practices.
[We] tried to locate the class within a longer history of site-
specific art and urban engagement." It is this integration of "old
media" with emerging technologies that is often missing in
current new media education. Media Art and new media
pedagogy are often presented unconnected to art historical
references. This is also reflected in teaching assignments that
are presented as if there is no history to new media pedagogy.
Many pedagogical approaches in new media are practices for
decades in the areas of design, video, film, photography or
performance.
While there is an urgent need to re-connect to historical
practices-- educators also need to ask about the professional
futures of students. There is no one stable "new media industry"
for which a static skill set could prepare the graduate for his or
her professional future in today's post-dotbomb era. Much under
negotiation, the term "new media" itself indicates a changing
signifier that does not point to one particular tool or medium. It
is a widely understood term that points to evolving technologies.
It also does not conclude that analogue media are suddenly
passé or that the history and
properties/specificities/idiocyncracies of the tools that we are
using is seen outside of their social context.

There is no monolithic industry to graduate into and therefore

the kind of media literacies necessary for a productive
professional future of students is hard to determine. It is not
clear at all for which professional futures most programs prepare
their students. In this uncertainty many departments resort to
the 'safe bet' of just-in-time knowledge/vocational training that
makes a student enter with Photoshop 5 to then graduate with a
later version of the software. Corporations like Nintendo run
colleges train students for a particular skill set that they need
two years later and leave out humanities courses. The young
worker is then left in the dark once their skills have been
exploited and are expired. Some educators in California
described how the Disney corporation lured talented, skilled
students before they graduate with salary offers that exceeded
their expectations at this point in their career. Years later these
workers were often not promoted as they did not have a Masters
degree and their skills were already spotty by then.

After this key problem of vocational training versus critical, solid

education the issues are manifold. From core curriculum and
feasible ways of introducing open source software into the
classroom, to meaningful methods to bring together readings,
art, and code awareness-- there is a sea of urgent and largely
unresolved topics. Wolfgang Muench, media artist and professor
at LaSalle SAI in Singapore asks "Who introduces students to
conceptual thinking? Who trains people in creativity? Can
creativity be taught at all? In our courses at LASALLE-SAI we
emphasize both critical thinking and technological skills. Many
students have no real sense of what critical thinking means. In
Asia the more common model is that students are listening, and
then repeat back to the teacher... We need to help the students
to unlearn, to try and open up to collaboration, for example. All
these efforts aim at making students more competitive. The
main educational challenge in Singapore is to show students that
there can be value in a project without immediate commercial
outcome, which is not always easy." Educators should aim to
educate cultural producers. I argue here for the term of the
cultural producer rather than the artist. A cultural producer is
one who mismatches the cultural expectations of the artist by
recognizing and accepting the artist’s responsibility to engage in
and create cultural debates. The term acknowledges the critical,
even political, role artists and also their works of art play in
culture.

This problem is by no means exclusive to Asia. Also in Europe

and the United States there is a lack of criticality and content in
student work in emerging fields. In the worst case scenario this
leads to the education of technocrats whose creative work, live
and decision making is centered around the computer-- heads
down thinking in the box. How can readings in new media theory
become wake-up calls for students leading to a degree of social
code awareness? Elizabeth Goodman, Portland-based artist and
researcher explains: "The sheer difficulty of making any
headway with unfamiliar and imperfect technologies such as
PocketPCs running an interface to a Bluetooth GPS module, or a
Flash animation, leads to the mistaken belief that the
technologies themselves are the most interesting part of a
project." Goodman argues for education of technology-based
work to address the properties of the tool that is used but go
beyond the machine. Between Futurist narratives of techno-
optimistic progress and the technophobia often encountered in
more traditional narratives the social context in which much of
the technological work is situated often gets lost. Because of the
pressure of learning programming languages or software
packages du jour there is often simply no time left to emphasize
critical concepts.

The imperative of the grid of the computer lab already

predetermines the focus of a given class in the learning context,
often inhibiting collaboration. Not all media art labs need
computers. The theater of new media education can be
performed just as well only with monitors and keyboards. This
model is discussed in several universities across the United
States. Here, students would simply bring their own laptops or
mini-Macs to class if needed. Predictable problems of non-
standardized software across students' computers may be a
solvable problem.
Collaboration online and in small media production teams in the
classroom and across campuses is a much acknowledged goal of
many educators. It is also the buzz word of the corporate world.
But John Hopkins, traveling media artist and networker, argues
for the facilitation of a dialogical platform for creative
engagement. He uses the term 'dialogue,' borrowed from Martin
Buber which he defines as "an energized exchange between the
self and the other. A bi-directional exchange, not just verbal but
a full exchange of human energies. This is what dialogue is
about. <...> When two people meet and they walk away with
more energy than they had prior to this encounter then
something has happened. When we engage with the other and
an excess energy remains after we part-- that is inspiration. My
teaching is a facilitation of open frameworks, of platforms in
which these inspirations can grow. I am, of course, also
sympathetic to Hakim Bey's 'Temporary Autonomous Zone.'"

One of the pivotal issues in shaping new media education is core

curriculum. Some propose the development of one core
curriculum for new-media art education. There is widespread
uncertainty and disagreement about which texts to use, which
art to show, and indeed: which skills to teach. There is a small
number of readers published now but they largely suffer from a
Euro/US-centrism. To introduce diversity into such contexts is an
important task: publications on race in relation to digital art are
few. The online archives of networks like <nettime>, The Sarai
Readers online, Lisa Nakamura writings, and in a larger context
"The Global Conceptualism" catalogue published by the Queens
Museum of Art, NY are useful but insufficient resources. [2] "Still,
today, new media educators are predominantly Caucasian men
and too many classes are comprised of white programming boys.
There is a lack of situated media theory/criticism that addresses
topics, which are relevant to a particular geographical region.
Much of new media theory is written and published in the United
States or Europe. While these materials are unquestionably
important, their use in the context of Asia, for example, has a
connotation of cultural colonialism. Texts often don't speak to
the local situation. Wolfgang Muench (LaSalle, Singapore) says
that "For the most part Western media critics speak to a Western
situation. But in Asia, books from the outside are perceived as
somewhat better, and it is very hard to change that perception.
A new mind set that matches their own cultural background
needs to be developed here." In between the United States and
Europe language barriers and local cultural contexts complicate
the migration of discourses. Contemporary German media theory,
for example, is virtually unknown in the United States and
discourses occupy different territories. This holds also true within
the EU. Likewise, many would benefit from translations of
current Brazilian writing on open source software.

Between Campus and Compost

Another crucial issue is that of core curriculum. Which
educational structures work best? Not all universities are willing
to allow for play, failure, and experiment in the shaping of core
curriculum. Who wants to pay for failure and play? At the same
time experiments and playful geek culture are essential in the
creation of creative environments. Structural experiments vary
from theme-based programs to media/or tool-oriented
departments.
Interdisciplinarity is the big buzz word but it is very rare that
cross-disciplinarity truly works. Collaborations between the arts
and sciences are the new label of many programs. Collaboration
means that all participants bring an interest in a common goal to
the process of working together. Although the term collaboration
is widely used, very little research has been carried out to
discover the properties of this process.
With the relatively recent advent of computer mediated
networked communication the nature of collaboration is coming
under more intensive scrutiny. But in art-sci collaborations the
artist often serves as illustrator who aestheticizes science and
thus at best communicates the findings of the scientist to a
public. What would an arts/science collaboration-- what would
actual interdisciplinarity-- look like? Here, much time would be
needed to develop trust and to learn about each person's
(professional) needs and desires. Time would be needed to
identify a shared goal, and the artist's concerns and interests of
the scientist would need to have equal weight in such coming
together. Unfortunately, interdisciplinarity is all too often
overshadowed by disciplinary condescension, incompatible
professional languages, and the different politics of artists and
scientists/engineers. Beatriz da Costa, faculty in the ACE
program at University of California at Irvine remarked at the
recent SSW conference that at her university for example,
engineers and artists circulate messages of contrary political
leaning on their departmental mailing lists. Do disciplinarians
need to speak to the standards of the engaged disciplines?
Artists encounter much disciplinary conceit with particular
disciplinarians thinking that their discipline is primary, the core
discipline to which others are welcome to contribute. Following
the business logic of U.S. American university there is a trend to
move the largest part of academic funding to the sciences.
Universities see this is as seed funding to pull in corporate grant
aiming for large scale profits which so far have not materialized.
In this battle over resources the humanities have no chance of
winning and the funding for these areas of inquiry may
increasingly be found only at Ivy League institutions who can still
afford the luxury. In the context of this funding dynamic a
widespread scientification of the arts can be noticed, which in
the battle for funding adapts to science formats. This is not
always a natural choice for artists. Artistic work is suddenly
framed as 'research' and 'case studies' are being carried out. A
Ph.D. is often necessary to apply for national science grants and
the noticeable interest in emerging new media practice-based
Ph.D.s may be related to this funding context for some.

A large part of resources in the university is spending on

software and its frequent costly updates. The consequent
introduction of Free Software and Open Source Software would
allow media art departments to spend their resources otherwise.
However, the problem is that IT companies still hardly make use
Open Source software. In a somewhat purist move some
educators insist on all software used in labs to be open source.
They also refuse Microsoft Word files from students. Students
see themselves professionally disadvantaged and contest such
exclusive open source approach. A hybrid, parallel introduction
of Open Source Software in labs is more sensible.

In the same context uses of social software in the classroom are

often discussed. [3] Stanley Aronowitz, distinguished professor
for sociology at CUNY Graduate Center and author of "The
Knowledge Factory," warns of the largest problem being that of
time. How do we spend our time? Between the many hours
spend on filtering, deleting and responding to emails, time spend
in Instant Messaging, etc-- When do we find the time to think?
Can we think while doing? However, students use social software
anyway outside of the classroom. Why not find ways of
integrating texting on cell phones, the use of del.icio.us, weblogs,
networked games, and wikis in the classroom? Blogging for
education (edblogging) is emerging as a widely used tool in new
media pedagogy that will be with us even once it is not cool
anymore. The economies of publishing output are a crucial issue
here with many scholars using blogs for their research but also
for discussion. A central problem that emerges is that of
participation in such participatory design platforms. What creates
deeper community beyond the revocable pleasure of just
chipping in once in a while. Alexander Halavais, 'blogologist' and
scholar at SUNY Buffalo, experienced about one third of his
students getting actively involved in blogging, using it also after
the course has ended. Another third would commit to and enjoy
blogging for the course period only. The remaining part of the
class would resist any blogging assignment.

The introduction of politics into the new media lab is often

encountered with much political and intellectual apathy. How do
we fight the intimidation that initiatives like "report your
teacher" by Lynne Cheney demand? This initiative asks students
to contact her think tank with quotes from professors who, for
example, publicly spoke out against the war in Iraq. A group of
private funding bodies is then asked to withdraw funding from
the universities at which the named professors teach. Then,
there is the Steve Kurtz case. [4] Megan Boler, media scholar,
educator and activist at the University of Toronto points to a
recent "CNN article that shows that a majority of young people
in the U.S. feel that the first amendment goes too far in its
assurance of rights. Data like this simply confirm that those of us
who have the privilege to teach in colleges and universities must
gather even more courage in what and how we are teaching. It
is incumbent upon those who have tenure and job security to
introduce the most unpopular ideas, to engage critical thinking it
the best ways we can understand this, and to encourage active
participation that engages new media." [5] In addition, there is
the every day politics of the technologies that we are using. An
example are the battles over the digital and wireless commons.

Between imagined non-hierarchies and the traditional models of

top-down education a middle-ground between these extremes
seemed the most fruitful to the people whom I interviewed.
Patrick Lichty (editor-in-chief, Intelligent Agent):
"In my reading of Vilem Flusser regarding discourse and dialogue
<...> 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 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."

In response to the high demands on educators in new-media art

education in which technology and theory have few precedents
and change rapidly-- several distributed learning tools were
developed that link up new-media educators to share code,
theory, and art in real time. A later study is planned that will
compare Rice University's Connexions, Harvard's H20, and iDC's
Distributed Learning Project. [6] One blind spot in the
implementation and population of such tools is a wide spread
ignorance of the social aspects of such participatory design
projects and long-term strategies for the success of such
participatory design contexts. Lots of blood, sweat and tears is
invested into complex code but opening a room does not mean
that people will come to party. What makes people contribute to
the public? The answer is good design but also a socializing of
the tool: human relationships/workshops/dialogue and online
networking. Understanding this social imperative also means
that financial resources have to be dedicated to the socialization
of such tools to support their long-term development.

Another important issue is that of tenure in relation to

economies of publishing output. Open publishing and open
content initiatives are discouraged under the current tenure
evaluation models. Publishing in open access online journals
does not "count" while closed access magazines are valued. This
barbwire mentality is transferred to teaching when professors
password protect their syllabi or keep their teaching materials
close to their chest. Jon Ippolito (faculty at the University of
Maine says that "Tenure, like copyright, has lost sight of its
original purpose. There is a parallel between the problem that
the university has in adapting to the digital world and the
problems that copyright has in adapting to that same world. In
both cases an initially very helpful idea has been corrupted into a
paradigm of scarcity that keeps knowledge products in a small
circle of a particular subculture. Currently, the tenure review
process does not account for collaborations, as you point out.
Knowledge is increasingly locked away, attached to money. In
the case of tenure the gold standard is contributing to academic
journals, each of which may cost a university $ 10,000 annually
in subscription fees. This makes a sizable number of
subscriptions to such magazines only possible for the Harvard's
and MIT's, and often leaves professors at other schools unable to
assign students their own texts because their library cannot
afford them."

I would like to end with a quote by Christoph Spehr:

"Teachers are dissatisfied, students are dissatisfied, the

educational system is dissatisfied, and society as a whole is
dissatisfied with education. <...> Everybody is calling for
education but nobody seems to be very interested in thinking
about it. ... I watched >Animatrix< again recently. There is a
scene in >Kid's Story<, situated in a classroom, a completely
alienated situation with the teacher being one of the >agents<
as it turns out. The cell phone of the kid rings. He switches the
phone off but it rings again. It is Morpheus telling him that he
has to get out of there because they are coming for him, which
confirms his half-conscious suspicions about the false reality he
lives in. This says everything about education. It shows the
teacher as the agent of the system, education as oppression, not
so much as indoctrination than as a prevention of thinking, of
waking up. But at the same time, there is that phone call, and
this is the other side of education. The call that gets through
somehow. This call is a fantasy about education, about teaching
- to do something that cuts through, that has an effect on
somebody, that reaches someone, that creates change."
"New negotiations are needed for educational systems, deals
that include much more free cooperation. Free cooperation also
in spaces where the >violent< functions of education may
happen, the >call<, the operations that have not been solicited -
because in free cooperation, people can accept this, because
they are not helpless, because they can control the situation
they are in."

How can "new media education" get ready for the morning after
when analogue, digital and networked media will be parallel,
even-leveled choices for artists? Now, this conversation about
education needs to go beyond the thick walls of the academy
and serve as model for discourses without.

Zurich, May 28, 2005

Trevor Scholz

Notes

[1] Share, Share Widely (SSW)

SSW was a conference about new-media art education that took
place in May 2005 in New York City. New media researchers and
educators, presented, discussed, and exchanged syllabi.
http://newmediaeducation.org

Conference Media Blog

http://mediablog.newmediaeducation.org

[2] Sarai Readers

http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader3.html

[3] Social software is any software that supports group

communications. The dynamics of social software are
significantly different from traditional interactions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software

[4] The Steve Kurtz Case

http://www.caedefensefund.org/

[5] CNN article referenced by Megan Boler

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/01/31/students.amendm
ent.ap/index.html

[6] Distributed Learning Project (Trebor Scholz, Tom Leonhardt):

Through topic maps and the semantic web the DLP cohesively
links blocks of knowledge from fields of inquiry as diverse as art
history (ie. conceptual art), film, literature, political science,
social sciences or cultural theory. How did ideas in these areas
precede, inspire or parallel developments in programming for the
arts or machine culture in general? How do these works relate
chronologically to each other? The DLP is a knowledge network
aiding research and teaching in the fields of new media art,
cultural theory, and programming in their social context.
http://dlp.distributedcreativity.org

[7] Multimedia Art Asia Pacific International Conference

http://www.ntu.edu.sg/sce/maap2004/

References

Essays by Okwui Enwezor, Terry Smith, Margarita Tupitsyn,

Peter Wollen and others. (1999) Global Conceptualism: Points of
Origin, 1950s-1980s. Distributed Art Publishers: New York.

Aronowitz, Stanley. (2001) The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling

the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning.
Beacon Press.

Spehr, Christoph. (2003) Gleicher als andere. Eine Grundlegung

der freien Kooperation. Karl Dietz Verlag. Berlin.

Lovink, Geert. My First Recession: Critical internet Culture in

Transition (Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/ NAi Publishers, 2003).

Scholz, T. (2005). Interview with Christoph Spehr.

http://www.rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=16100&text=30787

Halavais, A. (2005). Audio Presentation as part of Share, Share,

Widely Conference.
http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/educonversations/2005
/04/alex_halavais.html

Scholz, T. (2005). Interview with Elizabeth Goodman.

http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2005-
February/000024.html

Fields, K. (2005). Audio Presentation as part of Share, Share,

Widely Conference.
http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/educonversations/2005
/05/kenneth_fields__1.html

McCauley, K. (2005). Audio Presentation as part of Share, Share,

Widely Conference.
http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/educonversations/2005
/03/kevin_mccauley.html

Scholz, T. (2005). Interview with Patrick Lichty.

http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2005-
February/000027.html

Scholz, T. (2005). Interview with Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais.

http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2005-April/000036.html

Scholz, T. (2005). Interview with Wolfgang Muench.

http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2005-April/000040.html

Scholz, T. (2005). Interview with Ralf Homann.

http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2004-
November/000007.html

Scholz, T. (2005). Interview with Megan Boler.

http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2005-
February/000023.html

Scholz, T. (2005). Interview with John Hopkins.

http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2005-
March/000031.html

http://distributedcreativity.typepad.com/treborscholztexts/2005/05/education_for_
t.html

Web. 4 Feb 2010.

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_t.html>.