Started this entry in June 2022: First day of three-point-five weeks off work or so. I will not look at work emails until 05 July. Sick of the wood-headed, useless, and overtly entropic and toxic management at the office, specifically in the personage of the [now-and-forever-redundant-former] State Geologist. [Ah, to now be fully released from that toxicity!] This is the first bit of international travel since Covid—to attend Irma’s BSc graduation from the Reykjavík University Department of Computer Science. It will be good to see her, along with old friends and family, especially after the challenges of the past two years.
[She’s all graduated and currently in a dream job as Associate Software Engineer at CCP Games].
Picking it up now, two years later: Heading east, again. First, to Denver for a couple days, then straight on to Reykjavík, thanks to Simon, Bill, and Zander. Simon’s getting married in September, and arranged a trip to Iceland in celebration with his dad, Bill, his bro Zander, and a few friends. As Simon’s godfather (aka, gawdfadda) I was invited to join in on the expedition. I’ll arrive earlier and stay a bit longer to hang with Irma and Sara, Jón Teitur, and other family/friends. I’ll also hopefully be able to straighten out several official snafus with my digital access to my Icelandic pension, bank, and so on. The folks at Lífeyrissjóður starfsmanna ríkisins<(LSR) have been incredibly helpful via email—so much more than the archaic and bureaucratic system fronted by Social Security in the US (fax anyone?).
And in other developments, there are some serendipitous opportunities that are popping up in Iceland related to digital media and the arts as well, will report on those later. They indirectly relate to my starting up the photo/digital media program at the National Arts Academy long onto 34 years ago. Super interesting!
Saddened to receive news from Andrew that friend, colleague, artist, researcher, producer, and facilitator Minna Tarkka had passed, far too young, on 27 August after a very brief illness.
Researcher Minna Tarkka received the state award for media art in December 2017, Helsinki, Finland. Photo credit: Martti Kainulainen / Lehtikuva.
I arrived in Helsinki, Finland, gritty-eyed, after an early morning flight from Reykjavík, in late August, 1994, on the first of many visits, sojourns, gigs, workshops, and residencies. After dropping my luggage at my friend Visa’s print-making studio on Jääkärinkatu, I made my way to Arabianranta and the University of Art and Design Helsinki (Taideteollinen korkeakoulu, or TAIK, now the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture), located then in the old Arabia porcelain factory on Hämeentie. I was in Helsinki for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and, later, for an international performance event (Fax You) at the Akademie Bookstore on Helsinki’s Night of the Arts with the Finnish artist, Visa Norros and others. ISEA was being hosted that year by the Media Lab at TAIK and directed by Minna Tarkka, a person who did things, who showed up, and who inspired others to show up and do things.
I first met Minna later that morning at the TAIK Arabianranta building on the 3rd Floor at the Media Lab—actually we collided in the hallway—auspicious and a bit embarrassing! She was dashing from Point A to Point B as Director during the very hectic symposium registration. After both of us proffered sheepish apologies and introduced ourselves, she took me around, introducing me to some of the media arts luminaries attending the symposium and to staff at the Lab. This was the first of many examples of her unsparing generosity. It was during the symposium that I fully entered her energized sphere of influence there in Finland, where we had a number of memorable dialogues around the ethics and creative possibilities of the rapidly expanding field of electronic media in which she was a thought pioneer. As Associate Professor at the Lab, she later facilitated my return in the spring of 1995 to teach a four-week course. And a few years following that, she was totally supportive of the course netculture that I developed and taught at the Lab in 2000-2001. Her parallel trans-disciplinary course, “Cultural Usability,” critically examined new media design that was inclusive of sociological, cultural, and technological perspectives. Years earlier in 1987, she was the founding Director of MUU, the ‘alternative’ arts organization that has since been a major international player in new media arts. And two years later, she was a founding member of AV-arkki yet another power-house media arts resource and artists’ association there in Finland.
In those earlier days of our acquaintance (and of the WWW itself), her research and art work around spatial metaphors in virtuality, the aesthetics of immersion, and the dynamics of interaction and consumption were of special interest to me, as she explored the fundamentals of human relation as mediated by this ‘new’ technology. She made some highly original and deep dives into the aesthetic and ethical dimensions in the design of spaces for interaction. And all the while, she worked as a facilitator of human encounter, organizing, producing, and participating in many subsequent events, culminating with the formation of another cultural NGO, m-cult in 2000. Right up to the present, m-Cult has exerted a strong influence on the international critical engagement of culture with technology, leading with a profound sense of humane social activism. Yet another influential expression of her energies.
I never made a portrait of her and there seem to be only a handful of poor digital traces. She was a bit shy and soft-spoken. I have a vague memory of the epic RinneRadio concert at ISEA and a huge crowd dancing away, Minna included. She knew how to have an expansive time! That she is gone is yet another loss to many of us who are still pacing about this stage. Minna you will be fondly remembered and deeply missed.
[ED: I will add any reflections and comments from others to this posting as they surface. I’ve been reaching out to friends and former colleagues from those former life-changing times.]
An influence: experimental composer, sound artist, free and open thinker. (On Ubuweb; on Discogs). The first generation of 20th Century sonic artists are falling. Last August, it was R. Murray Schafer, before that in 2016 it was Pauline Oliveros.
Having students sit for 45 minutes to hear the entirety of “I am sitting on a room …” — last imposed that on my “Ways of Listening” students at UTS in Sydney. They absorbed it without complaint, unlike my Amurikan students who balked and whined <sigh>.
“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”
Lucier’s 90th birthday celebration … a 24-hour global performance of … “I am sitting in a room” … May 2021
Teaching is not a behavioral product. It is a lived praxis. (How many times have I used that phrase in this blog? lived praxis). But how to explain a failure, a collapse, an implosion in the learning process? What are these manifestations in life? Recovery from collapse is certainly a learned skill with an ultimate value in life. But irruption or, worse, a slow, tired, wheezing descent into nullification: now that’s some bad shit to deal with.
Taking on a learning situation as an open system—open to change and influence—as a temporally circumscribed instance in a long continuity of flows, of life, this is a singular process to face.
Isn’t it such that knowledge comes from the lived process of experientially reduced and filtered sensual input? Failure loses any negative connotation when considered simply as one path in the infinitely variable flux of sensual experience.
This text started out as a brief meditation on past instances of perceived failure to imbueknowledge — or, to simply imbue lived experience. It surfaced in the context of the widespread, forced turn to remote learning as other forms of proximal human presence become untenable for viral risk. As long as the alienating loss that is implicit in the mediatory technology is recognized and qualified, the remote presence+absence, taken together, may at least sustain some human connection. The loss, however, has profound affect on life.
Lacking the mental focus to continue along that line of musing, I instead jump to the present: which hides and reveals itself. Possible trajectories, once solid, shimmer and vanish: fata morgana, fata americana, fata mondial, fata cosmologica. Other trajectories suddenly loom, darkening, from root chakra, muladhara. And yet others take on material forms: structures, potentials, spaces, and energized flows: water, air, and earth. Eyes open to another spectral zone, seeing mind in things.
The oracle will be cast, commentaries and interpretations will follow, those with ears will hear, eyes will read, if subscribed!
I’ve been using the neoscenes pseudonym, brand, art-name, label, whatever, since 1983. I came up with it back when I was living in Santa Monica, California, around the time that I was beginning to print and mail a lot of postcards. Yes, back when I was a passable-but-not-very-talented surfer, back when Reagan’s brain disease became very apparent, and when Suicidal Tendencies was just a band. Back when I used to dress in a three-piece suit and drive a Fiat Spyder convertible down the Santa Monica Freeway to the Harbor Freeway into Downtown Los Angeles up to five days a week, exiting opposite the Bonaventure Hotel, parking in the underground garage under the corporate headquarters of Union Oil Company of California and marching to the elevator, riding to the third floor, often with the CEO, saying hello to that blond girl, Carol? Cindy? who worked the front desk, and, cruising down the hall to the right, past Lida, my secretary, to my office from the window of which, if you leaned up against the walnut-paneled wall and it wasn’t too smoggy a day, you could see THE HOLLYWOOD sign that has been such an icon for the movie-going world… Enough said…
The neoscenes.net domain was reserved back in 1998 or so, and although there is an interior design consultancy in Mauritius ‘neoscenes.com’ and a piece of video editing software ‘neoscenes’ that both came later to the web, neoscenes.net dominates any searches using the name.
WORKSHOP TITLE: Ways of Listening: An Encounter with Acoustic Ecology
TIME: 02 APRIL 2016, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM at the Natural History Institute, 312 Grove Avenue, Prescott College Campus, Prescott, Arizona
DESCRIPTION: This workshop tunes into the phenomena of sound within natural systems while exploring the roots of a socially relevant creative practice.
We will critically engage the concepts, situations, and tools that are encountered along the way. Addressing the impact of human presence within our daily experience, we will listen to each other and to the world.
Dr. John Hopkins leads this workshop that tunes into the phenomena of sound within natural systems, while exploring the roots of a socially relevant creative practice — sound recording. You will critically engage with the concepts, situations, and tools used both in the field and in the lab. Addressing the impact of human presence within our daily experience, we will listen to each other and to the world.
Participants will meet at the Natural History Institute’s gallery (312 Grove Ave, Prescott, AZ) for a brief introduction before carpooling to a nearby nature preserve for audio recording and listening exercises. Back at the Prescott College Media Lab (in the same building as the Natural History Institute), participants will listen to their recordings and be introduced to sound software and techniques.
This workshop will happen rain, snow or shine. Please come prepared with layers, water, a brown bag lunch to be enjoyed at the nature preserve, sun protection, and any audio-recording equipment you may have, including a phone with a sound recording app.
Links referenced/suggested in talk and for workshop:
Meeting with Tony about next spring’s Ecosa curriculum. He shares an organic sketch for the program that will be based in a shared teaching process with simultaneous threads: Nature’s Design; Technical Resources; Community Development; Art & Culture; Communication Design; and Ecological Design Studies. Covering Art & Culture would be my input in the process. The boundaries between the threads would be extremely porous — they would need to be to actualize the potential of the learning instance and to help it stand apart from traditional university/art&design programs. To realize the potential, efforts will have to circulate around how to orchestrate this organic open system.
Meanwhile, writing has fallen away as an expressive medium. The state of mind necessary to craft a meaningful and energized sequence of words on a screen (or anywhere else!) is no longer accessible.
So, Displace finally arrives from the printers — Dovile did a fine job designing it, and overall it looks good thanks to Mindaugas’ hard work as Editor-in-Chief. The editing process went on three times longer than we originally had hoped, but I guess that’s just another lesson on how to estimate the work on a complicated project. Mindaugas is sending me a case of sixteen for the record, and it will be interesting to look through the physical copy to see all the mistakes I might have made! Argh!
Subject: [MigAA] Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 18:59:36 +0100
Finally long awaited the third Migrating Art Academies publication Displace is out! If anyone is interested in ordering a copy, please do send a short note to info (at) migaa (dot) eu.
Best,
Mindaugas
Displace A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
ISBN 978-609-447-143-8
This book — the third Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) publication — marks the end of the third phase of the MigAA program, which, over the course of seven years has grown into a dynamic and vital network of art academies and universities, independent arts organizations, many hundreds of people, and endless ideas. It documents the results of sixteen innovative workshops the network organized during the last four years that took place across nine European countries.
The book includes works, essays, concepts, and other documentary and peripheral material developed before, during, and after the sixteen different workshops. It is first of all presented as a source for any and all emerging artists who search for a means of creating, nurturing, and manifesting their ideas. Secondly, it is meant as a source for inspiring and fresh perspectives for professional artists experiencing a creative block or who are stuck in unproductive patterns of thought. Finally, for those seeking to understand contemporary art and its challenges, it constitutes an excellent window into the surprising variety of practices with which the participating artists addressed the issues that confronted them.
In order to emphasize the distributed nature of the MigAA network, the book is designed with no particular hierarchic continuity. The only source of continuity is the page numbering that follows the chronological sequence of the laboratories: each of them are separated into chapters corresponding to the name of the laboratory. The chapters are presented in a random order to reflect the open nature of the network. Each laboratory/chapter is formatted the same: identifying where it took place, and providing the relevant information on the input, the process, and the output, as well as an introduction section and a list of participants.
The publication of this book could not have been possible without the enthusiastic and farsighted support of the EU Culture Programme 2007-2013, Nordic Culture Point, and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
1. Always take the initiative.
2. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need.
3. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.
4. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
5. Learn to live with your mistakes.
6. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern.
7. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it.
8. There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
9. Carry bolt cutters everywhere.
10. Thwart institutional cowardice.
11. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
12. Take your fate into your own hands.
13. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape.
14. Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory.
15. Walk straight ahead, never detour.
16. Manoeuvre and mislead, but always deliver.
17. Don’t be fearful of rejection.
18. Develop your own voice.
19. Day one is the point of no return.
20. A badge of honor is to fail a film theory class.
21. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema.
22. Guerrilla tactics are best.
23. Take revenge if need be.
24. Get used to the bear behind you.
Cronin, P., 2012. Herzog on Herzog, Faber & Faber Ltd.
Frieder gives a great performance, lecturing on the history of algorithmic art. He’s marvelous at extemporaneous speaking and this, of course, a subject for which he is known as a (the!) pioneer. Every conversation I’ve ever had with him arrives instantly at some synthesis of this level of intelligence, knowledge, thought, humor, and/or empathetic sharing, no wonder his students really thrive!
To really gain from an educational, learning encounter, one needs to be in dialogue with the person one is communicating/learning with. Roles may be played (i.e., ‘student’ – ‘teacher’) but whatever the case, it has to be a dialogue, not a sequence of monologs, not bound by fear to a strict set of social protocols, not a call-and-response between priest and supplicant: it has to adapt to the contingency of knowledge differentials between the two. Everyone should be learning within the encounter. At its foundation, it needs to be an open exchange, filling in the open spaces that are hollowed (hallowed!?) by ignorance.
MediaMOO is a text-based, networked virtual reality environment or “MUD” running on the Internet. Its basic structure is a representation of the MIT Media Lab. Users connect in the LEGO Closet, and then step out into the E&L (Epistemology and Learning research group) Garden:
Bilder sind der Gegenstand unserer Arbeit.
Bilder sind für uns meist digitale Bilder, Gegenstand und Mittel algorithmischen Arbeitens.
Bilder erscheinen als Modell, Präsentation und Interaktion.
Wir sehen Bilder als Zeichen im digitalen Medium.
Unsere Forschung bezieht sich auf Bild, Zeichen und Medium.
Unsere Lehre ist Herstellung von Lernumgebungen.
Wir experimentieren immer, auch in der Lehre.
Unsere Arbeit geht über Disziplinen hinaus.
Ihre Wurzeln hat sie in der Informatik, bei der Algorithmik.
Doch sie berührt Semiotik, Pädagogik, Gestaltung, Medientheorie, Ästhetik, Kunst, ein wenig sogar Ökonomie.
All das kommt zusammen in der Gestaltung digitaler Medien.
Wir sehen Informatik als eine Technische Semiotik oder als Semiotische Technik.
Wir tragen zu einer grundlegenden Theorie der Informatik bei.
Digitale Medien sind Prozesse: transient, nie fertig.
Zeichen im und auf dem Computer sind algorithmische Zeichen.
Sie kommen mit der Maschinisierung von Kopfarbeit auf.
Unsere Haltung ist prinzipiell skeptisch und kritisch.
Daraus ziehen wir Energie für Gestaltung.
The N-1 event is curious — I wasn’t aware it was a pedagogic exercise to be acted out in front of (!) students at Arcada. This makes it a bit awkward with some of the invited people, though I simply jump in to the scene, aiming that for the students it would not be a business-as-usual pedagogic activity. That was hard to overcome in the lecture hall (suitably exquisite quality as is any Finnish public construct). So we oscillate in and out of the building, the lobby, outside, and so on, enjoying the cool sunshine. The students somewhat perplexed, but seemingly engaged or at least present.
Most of us live much of our lives in the ether. We have a mobile phone with us at all times with the result that we are always on and never truly alone. We have maps and geo-positioning on our phones so that we are always traceable and never truly lost. We tweet and update our Facebook status so that we often say what comes into our minds when it comes into our minds, and we are rarely truly reflective.
In all of this we are telling each other stories about what we are doing, and from this we curate stories about who we are. From all the shards and slivers that we scatter across the digiverse we are piecing together new kinds of identities – and these identities propel us in some directions and constrain us from moving in others. more “quick notes”
Anna Cook; Ethan Daniel; Sean Faling; Thomas Huber; Jeannie Nguyen; Matthew Nickells; Andrew Oetjen; Kelley O’Hare; Kate Phillips; Nell Pollak; BiYing Su
Zachary Ardente; Tristan Bambauer; Kelsey Brown; Sara Bryant; Brandi Darnell; Will Dow; Dillon Drenzek; Maddy Fendell; Wynter Finley; Ellyn Green; Christine Hurty; Alex Klinger; Vincent McComb; Adam Meis; Sydney Nelson; Anna Pearson; Mike Pollard; Ryan Wilding; Jesse Zarat
Classes begin to wind down/wind up: finals this week. Ending dialogues and monologues.
At the moment, sitting in the final for the History and Theory of Digital Art. The final consists of a collaborative effort to modify the general class notes into the ultimate ‘cheat sheet’ for a final examination on the History and Theory of Digital Art. The collective notes accumulated through the efforts of a different pair of students each class session using a single google doc to take notes on. Among other issues, this obviated the HUGE distraction of ancillary web-surfing in class. And it provides an excellent exercise of collaborative knowledge-building (which should be the standard for learning facilitation at this point in time). The down side was the lack of coherent group synergy which stems from at least two factors — irregular attendance and me not enforcing the ‘dialogue’ assignments weekly (which is related to the attendance issue). Turns out that many of the dialogue situations were arbitrarily skipped by students, and so the effect that worked well in the consistency of the MiT class failed in the instance of this class. Inconsistent attendance is a primary sign of the lack of importance of the class, that it is not compelling, or that there are more pressing things than school to be engaged with.
It was self-determined how to distribute tasks on what/how to address the upgrade. The first hour was divvied up, one class day for each person to mod. Then the second hour is used for anyone to work on any part of the text. The balance of the class session is used to clean-up.
The result? Is it a proper cheat sheet? What is collaborative knowledge generation anyway?
Why did these two art classes proceed so poorly compared to similar ones that I taught a decade ago at CU. Are my standards or expectations too high? Not high enough? Especially in comparison to the “Meaning of Information Technology” group: night and day. I need to have smart and engaged students to establish and sustain an energized dialogue. The challenge of immature students, dis-engaged, dis-interested — divested from their own learning process by the structural violence of the system — may be lessened depending on their raw precocity, but in the end, they do need to step up and away from passive learning paradigms. The problems were definitely enmeshed in my own response to a broad lack of attentiveness — a reactionary trait of which I am guilty. My response is to simply pull away incrementally from what is normally a condition of open sharing.
As per usual, every class evolves its own characteristic vibe. Thank god the cumulative total vibe is in the positive. Else learning facilitation would be a non-starter.
A fundamental question: Is this a systemic thing, versus a localized immediate problem? That’s all I can do, ask the questions, and see about discovering actionable intelligence. And change conditions when possible, and relinquish control when necessary.
Students take control of classroom, locking door, and start teaching each other Chinese, making cut-out collages, doing homework, puzzles, editing music, watching “Portlandia”, and, most of all, talking to each other, interacting. Beautiful to watch. Nice to participate in. Didn’t record the results, but hey, you had to be there!. The vacuum of the Boulder Bubble is reversed and instead turned into a high-energy source.
Prof. Ajume Wingo invited me to join in the Global Development Group that is being organized by Prof. Paul Chinowsky, Mortenson Professor of Sustainable Development, in the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities Program. It looks to be an interesting program with about 40 senior faculty from across the university participating. Not sure how deeply I’ll be able to get involved given that I’m short-timing at CU at this point, but I noted that at one of the first meetings that brought a majority of the participants together, Paul ran with my suggestion to pair people off in such a way that the disciplinary boundaries are broken down. I used the dialogue assignment as an example — where time spent in face-to-face engagement goes a long way in the construction of a shared protocol that will bridge the oft-times exclusive disciplinary languages. It is my belief that these shared protocols are crucial to the success of a transdisciplinary collaboration and that the human networks they depend on are constructed only at the speed of life (as I have said elsewhere in this blog), not quicker.
John Hopkins (BSc, MFA, PhD) has worked for the last 25+ years as a nomadic media artist and autonomous learning facilitator across 25 countries and more than 60 cultural and academic learning institutions. His workshops explore issues of sustainable creative practices, ‘big-picture’ system views, tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY, Open Source, and DIWO (Do-It-With-Others or community-based DIY) processes, and the appropriation of global IT networks as the site for autonomous creative activity: Temporary Autonomous Zones. Resonating with both David Bohm’s and Martin Buber’s ideas around the power of human encounter and dialogue, he facilitates experiential learning around collaborative engagement. His own media-arts research is a practice-based exploration into the effects of technological development on human encounter and relationship. His views on global development are informed as a former member of the Imperialist Vanguard (Big Oil), he now draws on the rigors and knowledge-base of that experience while leaving behind the fixed and fear-drenched assumptions about the Other that drives the core of the military-industrial-academic complex. A CU alumni, he is currently teaching on the “Meaning of Information Technology” in the ATLAS/TAM program along with several digital arts courses in A&AH. He maintains an extensive web presence at https://neoscenes.net/blog/ and https://neoscenes.net/ that documents his practice.
Indeed, yes, apparently still teaching. Spring Break lost to a bug that flattened numerous other folks before it finally settled in my chest for two weeks, faugh. It was robust enough to consume my entire break, setting me behind a solid two weeks on all the tasks that I needed to get done before expatriating in five weeks.
Teaching proceeds unevenly. Half the time it feels like baby-sitting as the art students seem to resist most openings to expressive potential. They seem to resent being prodded into a space of the unknown — am I pushing too hard, not enough? The dynamic of this resistance is hard to parse. Do they simply not recognize the opening? Or is it fear, or simply an inability to expand into the dimension of open creative situation that I am facilitating? The fear isn’t one of those palpable, sweaty things, but more a deeper and amorphous presence. It appears to thrive in the university art/art history department — although it is perceptible elsewhere, as soon as one begins to look — but not as such a dominant presence as in the digital art classes (versus the Meaning of Information Technology classes which cross disciplinary lines dramatically). Why does it have a home in an area of activity, a ‘discipline,’ that should be largely free from such negative emotion? One adjunct colleague who is leaving this university for a far better situation at one in Texas seems to get the students moving, but he’s been here for a ten-year stretch and has settled on a process that takes into consideration whatever it is that is going on here. It’s the same thing that is feeling so completely oppressive for me. After a decade away from US academia, this past year as CU-Boulder has brought my confidence in teaching (more accurately, the facilitation of learning) to a grinding dead end. Maybe that’s the problem: facilitation rather than dictation. What gives?
A PBS doco exploration of the early developments around transistors at Fairchild in what became Silicon Valley. Exploring the dynamics of both the technological development, as well as the human that spawned, supported, and made the devices. DOD plays a major role, as per usual.
Mulling over the way to go — how to carve a trajectory through the knowledge space? — perennial (no, daily!) question. Confronting the students with a more random array of inputs (texts, discussion-lectures, other material) forces a certain kind of sense-making. Or does it merely confuse? In conversation with one colleague who is involved in teaching rhetorics, a friend of EJ’s who is now a voting member of the AAUP’sCommittee A* (!), it seemed clear that the tools necessary for sense-making are gradually slipping out of vogue. They are perhaps simply too hard to acquire within the framework of the corporate education schema. This leaves learners without some crucial tools for dealing with (questioning) the nature of reality. The “critical thinking” rubric seems hollowed-out as a singular approach without more basic sensory (‘sensual’ as David Abrams puts it) awareness. This goes back to Howard Rheingold’s “Net Smarts” book which explores mindfulness as one profound and crucial way to approach aspects of reality and, specifically, the aristocracy of technology that we now abide within. A holistic approach that considers our embodied be-ing and it’s relation to the rest of reality as completely connected at all levels seems to provide such an entry point. Assuming connectedness and sussing out how — rather than invoking certain aspects of the scientific method that often assumes disconnectedness with the need to prove any co-relation — instead sussing out the nature of connected relation.
* elsewhere I’ll have to get into the contentious issues surrounding Committee A (sounds like something out of Pravda): tenure being a primary one!
blurr. faces, voices, situations; I seem to have a penchant of being boring when introducing an open framework. At least to the jaded percentage. This comes as an effect of talking about things rather than doing things — I tend to like to talk a situation out, establishing a framework, then going for the open-system madness. Then there is the physical situation — window-less rooms, bunkers for indoctrination: smart classrooms. hints at the problem with smart phones. Why do we need smart devices to live by/for/with? Is not innate intelligence enough to survive on? Doesn’t evolutionary thriving of the species suggest that our intelligence is enough, or are our tools necessary?
Why can’t learning be undertaken in a completely positive way? Getting on with things. Getting on with the things that matter, that resonate, that are absolutely relevant to the undertones of wide-scaled life (specifically not relevant to the transitory fluff of the hyper-mediadrome that speaks only to itself and in only the case of self-aggrandizement).
I just ran across this excerpt from Geert’s first internet-oriented book — way back in 2003 — in the chapter on “tactical education” entitled “The Battle over New Media Art Education.” This is a section of that chapter titled Neoscenes Pedagogy:
The Digital Bauhaus concept may be a fata morgana amidst a never-ending institutional nightmare. The new-media subject appears at the end of a long global crisis in the education industry. Decades of constant restructuring, declining standards and budget cuts have led to an overall decline of the .edu sector. There are debates not only about fees, cutbacks in staff and privatization but also about the role of the teacher. For a long time the classic top-down knowledge delivery methods of the classroom situation have been under fire. In a response to the education crisis, the American-Scandinavian John Hopkins calls for a cultural shift towards alternative pedagogies. His pedagogy, close to that of Paolo Freire, is based on a combination of face-to-face and networked communication, keeping up a “flow of energies from node to node.” Hopkins, who calls himself an “autonomous teaching agent,” has roamed between Northern European universities and new-media initiatives and currently teaches in Boulder, Colorado. His spiritual-scientific worldview might not match mine, but he is certainly my favorite when it comes to a radical education approach. Hopkins prefers the person-to-person as a “tactical” expression of networking, avoiding “centralized media and PR-related activities wherever possible.” Hopkins’ “neoscenes” networks are “a vehicle for learning, creating and sharing that does not seek stasis, spectacle and speed.”
In a few instances, Hopkins’ “distributed Socratic teaching strategy” has culminated in 24-hour techno parties with a big online component to make room for remote participation and exchange. The challenge with the live remix streams was to find out collectively “how exactly to facilitate autonomy and spontaneity.” For Hopkins teaching is a “life practice,” an action that embodies “art as a way-of-doing.” He calls his style “verbose and densely grown (not necessarily meaningful either ;-). but I do try to say what I am thinking and practicing … ” Hopkins tries not to make a distinction between learning, teaching and being taught. “It is critical that I myself am transformed by the entire engaged experience.” As a visiting artist, and usually not a member of the “local academic politburo,” Hopkins can build up personal connections within a local structure, free to “catalyze a flexible response that is immediately relevant,” while maintaining a creative integrity that is based in praxis.
. . .
John Hopkins: “I start my workshops with a sketching of some absolute fundamentals of human presence and being in the phenomenal world. This beginning point immediately becomes a source of deep crisis for some students precisely because they are expecting the vocational top-down educational experience of learning a specific software platform and making traditional artifacts.” John finds people who focus on software platforms “incredibly boring. It’s like amateur photo-club members comparing the length of their telephoto lenses or having conversations about national sports. It’s a code system for communication that is often mindless and banal. While at some level, my students are forced to confront the digital device. I encourage them to be aware of how they are interacting with the machine, what is comfortable and what is not.”
. . .
John Hopkins compares Scandinavia and the USA, places he knows well. “Because of a well-funded cultural industry sector in Scandinavia, artists who are potential teachers are not forced into teaching as happens in the US. This has kept the stagnation of the tenure-track system, something that dogs US higher education, out of the way. In the US, artists who have any desire to live by working in some way in their medium are more often than not forced into academia because there is no other social context for them. They may or may not be teachers in any sense. There tend to be more permeable and productive interchanges between the ‘art world’ and ‘academia’ in Scandinavia and northern Europe, realized by cycling a larger number of idiosyncratic individual teacher/artists into contact with students.” Isolated campus life. slow and complicated bureaucracies, and the politically correct atmosphere at US universities are not ideal circumstances for a hybrid “trans-disciplinary” program to thrive. However, the campus setup does help to reduce distractions, once students know what they want and the resources are in place.
Lovink, G., 2003. My First Recession, Rotterdam, NL: V2-NAi Publishers.
Caitlin Ammerman, Shane Bauldauf, Hannah Black, Graham Bowman, Kelly Brichta, Sam Carnes, Sam Carrothers, Alyx Chapman, Blake Clapp-Lee, Anna Cook, Dakota Cotton, Sammie Elvove, Lulu Eyears, Jon Giehl, Michelle Harrison, Becca Herschorn, Scott Hodges, Laura Kauffman, Caroline Kennedy, Leigh Marr, Vahid Mazdeh, Davis McClure, Mallorie McDowell , Katie McMenamin, Stephen Motta, Harper Nelson, Daniel Rankin, Melanie Rogers, Peter Sawers, Betsy Schiel, Florencia Selasco, Mitchell Sellinger, David Stanek, Maggie Still, Madeleine Towne, Hannah Tuell, Kelly Turgeon, Patrick Vargas, Mitchell Wolfe
Drop in on Diane’s MiT class this morning in the large ATLS100 lecture room — she’s covering privacy issues. Huge class — I think she’s got more than 100 students enrolled. Quite different than my section of 38.
Surveillance, privacy, monitoring, searching, tracing, 1984, algorithmic filtering and screening of dataspace (face recognition, etc), Mugshots; the students had an assignment to do a name-search on a partner to find out as much as possible. Sitting near the back of the room, a majority of students are paying almost no attention to Diane — instead doing the usual retinue of screen-based tasks — other homework, Facebooking, shopping, and so on. This is disappointing in that it highLights the contemporary situation where even a highly-rated (entertaining!) university teacher is not really engaging the students. In a class of one hundred, filled with mediating screens, what should one expect. Human engagement between teacher and student has been lost in the shuffle of money/power that has become US academia.
Presence is projected out from the Self in a variety of ways — mediated and unmediated, well, always mediated by something: body heat by air (as thermal energy arising from energized interactions, catalyses, and transformations within the body). Presence is more and more being pushed (expressed) into what may be called technological networks. Distributed into more and more finely atomized (digitized!) fragments, and more and more widely distributed in both space and time. Coded, derived, lost in the data-space. When presence is so diffused into that space, we lose what we have here, now. Gone. No chance for an energized encounter when Selves are all pointed away from each other and thoroughly atomized…
week 13:
28 november – day 25 – (Group 10 Presentation: Music & Digital Media – Davis, Hannah, & Leigh / Group 1 Respondents – Shane, Caitlin, & Mitchell) link to collective notes
Part 2.Then using any insight gained from the reading and your own personal experience, explain your moral standing on music sharing in four to five sentences. Then give a brief description of what service you find to be most effective and why.
week 13:
26 november – day 24 – (Group 9 Presentation: IT & War – Flo, Maggie, David / Group 2 Respondents – Hannah, Graham, Melanie) link to collective notes
assignment:
Part 1. Post ONE response on your blog BEFORE consuming the assigned material: In general, describe the relationship between IT and war as it has existed throughout history and into the present. (Your response only needs to be one or two sentences)
Part 2. Consume the following material:
Video: The Military Invented the Internet: What Next? (It’s short but makes some great points. You may want to watch it more than once, if you’re into that.)
Text: War and Technology (The article is kind of dense, it took about 25 minutes to read.)
As you WATCH the video and READ the text, extract THREE TOTAL QUOTES from either source that confirm or challenge your PART ONE RESPONSE
Part 3. Post the THREE quotes on your blog along with a short response that states a conclusion addressing the relationship between IT and war and, by UTILIZING THE QUOTES, forms an argument supporting that conclusion.
week 12:
14 november – day 23 – (Group 8 Presentation: Virtual Reality – Caroline, Betsy, & Jon / JH is Respondent)
link to collective notes
assignment: Before reading, write on your blog your initial understanding of virtual
reality, then write how much you think you interact in/with Virtual Realities. Then go to the reading to be FINISHED for today::
[see pdf in email on listproc sent by Jon]
assignment: on your blog platform, generate at least 3 questions for the readings.
hmm, well, another election. or so. Boulder voting 71% for Barack, and legalized pot. Amendment 64.
having fun with my students, they are struggling and coming up with what they can, the bar is high, the class can be harsh on presentation crits…
anyway, researching some Virtual Reality papers to pass on:
The modern notion of space is a compound metaphor that embodies all our concepts and experiences of separation, distinction, articulation, isolation, delimitation, division, differentiation and identity. The laws of perspective and of geometry for us are a codified summary of our normal experience of alienation, unique identity, and un-relatedness. It has all been abstracted, externalized, and synthesized into the cold, empty void we call space. This metaphor of space is our modern mechanism for avoiding the experience of oneness, of the chaos, of the ultimate state of unity to which the mystic seers and philosophers of all ages have referred.
Jones, R.S., 1982. Physics as metaphor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
The topic of today’s student presentation is “Virtual Communities” so I arranged with Howard (Rheingold) that he pop in for a short Q&A with the students.
week 11:
05 november – day 20 – (Group 5 Presentation: Virtual Communities – Sammie, Becca, & Vahid / Group 11 Respondents – Kelly, Patrick, & Harper) SPECIAL GUEST – Howard Rheingold link to collective notes
[assignment: chose one of these lectures and make a 4-500 word blog entry – 4 PM – Atlas Speakers Series : Digital Media Design, Gender & Games]
week 10:
29 october – day 18 – (Group 3 Presentation: Viral media & Crowd-sourcing – Kelly, Alyx, & Peter / Group 13 Respondents – Mitchell, Dakota, & Anna) link to collective notes
assignment: reading to be FINISHED for today:
Bilton, N., 2010. Has Viral Gone Viral? New York Times.
assignment: on your blog platform, generate at least 3 questions for the readings.
Mid-term exam in MiT went down yesterday. Unfortunately without my local presence. After a foray to Denver to catch a special “Faculty Night” preview of the latest show at the MCA-Denver, I met Marisa for a bit and then headed home for some final tweaks to the exam. The structure of the exam evolved at least partly from my distaste for ‘standardized assessment’ in the learning context, but also from how the social dynamic of the class is naturally progressing. Technically the course is a ‘lecture’ course — meaning that the prof prepares and presents (highly organized!) packages of material along with readings and other material that the students have to digest. Some time may be designated for ‘discussion,’ but what quality of discussion can one have with 40 people? As this was easily the largest class group I’ve ever had in the last 25 years of teaching, I definitely was in for some troubles. Preparing a set of power-points that amply illustrate my take — the trajectory that I am mapping though the territory — would have taken weeks. Joel gave me all his which are very polished and content-rich, but I just couldn’t use them as it would have been a very unnatural scenario, delivering someone else’s view.
At any rate, the class as a group, led by a good number of individuals seems to have taken to self-directing the latter half of the semester. Group presentations every day until December. The idea of local knowledge-generation seems especially important in this age. So, the exam structure that I ended up coalescing around was group-work-based. Six groups of six, and one of three. The groups were composed of the same groupings that are scheduled for topical presenter/respondents. So, each group of six is composed of two smaller groups of three: the groups of three each have to run an entire class session on a particular topic in the next weeks, with the other group of three as their questioners (and note-takers). I created seven google-docs with 12 questions each, some of the questions the same across the different groups, mostly not, though.
At the start of the exam time, I release the google doc to each group and let them do whatever, however, for the 75 minutes.
The only hitch was that in the middle of the night before, I woke up really sick. Got up at 0600, and promptly started vomiting. I knew there was no way I could even cycle up to the university, I could barely keep my head without passing out. Argh! So, from bed, I got everything ready, and sent out an email to the class telling them what was going on. And, at 0900, released the docs, watched for a few minutes, passed out, woke up and it was 1000, and a couple students had emailed me that they hadn’t gotten access to the docs (fortunately, they did a work-around). After 15 minutes, I shut down the docs and collapsed back into bed for the next 24 hours. Some nasty bug, not sure really what it was, but a nasty headache, disorientation. Somewhat like a migraine, but not. Feeling somewhat better after 24 hours, but will have to stay in bed longer.
I’ll do a de-brief on Monday to see how it went. I am quite disappointed that I couldn’t have been there to see the activity, that was an important objective for me, although I do have the results in hand. Haven’t felt good enough to look at them yet. And have to get the last copy scan of the dissertation done so I can send it to Jan to get bound and over to the library. So that chapter will be DONE.
week 8:
17 october – day 15 – 17 october – [TUTORIAL 0800-0900 1B31]
(Group 2 Presentation: IT & Politics – Hannah, Graham, & Melanie/ Group 9 Respondents – Flo, Maggie, & David) link to collective notes
assignment:to be FINISHED for today: compiled questions/answers for the Mid-term examination. (google doc)
assignment:reading to be FINISHED for today:
Safranek, R., 2012. The Emerging Role of Social Media in Political and Regime Change.
assignment: on your blog platform, generate at least 3 questions for the readings.
TAM Open House 4:00 – 6:00 PM in First Floor Lobby [TUTORIAL 5:00 – 6:30 PM ROOM 202 upstairs]
I can’t believe how much time this MiT class is taking! Help! At least it seems if it is going well, some bumps, but relatively smooth. The student presentations are proceeding and also seem to be succeeding in the goal of data filtration and information transfer. Actually that’s not what I want, I want to see life-practices shifted. (tough for a non-studio-praxis course). I actually want to avoid mere information transfer, I would rather they get something substantial rather than just a grade. (argh, assessment! grading! it skews the learning encounter more than any single social protocol.) I hope the experiment in self-testing/grading will not turn too many of them off to the knowledge-construction process. I’m making it a rather complex multi-layered sense-making exercise with many strands of encounter- and process-dependent query. It is simulating the complexity of a multi-attentioned (multi-tasking) mediated environment — actually not a simulation, but the thing itself. Certainly would have done a number of processes differently than I did, but it’s always that way.
week 8:
15 october – day 14 – Digital Art – [TUTORIAL 0800-0900 1B31] Art on the Net and for the Net (optional, no questions required)
assignment: reading to be FINISHED for today:
for readings see the email I sent to the listproc on the morning of Thursday 10/11 subject “digital art” & look through the ‘aside’ links for this week
assignment: on your blog platform, generate at least 3 questions for the readings.
[assignment: chose one of these lectures and make a 4-500 word blog entry- 4 PM – Atlas Speakers Series : The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem]
assignment:to be FINISHED for today: On your blog, describe your personal network — information and attention feeds — log your media input/output for a day & write a 4-500 (of more) word description of it: your media-sphere (inputs and outputs) — where do you focus your attention, on who, what?
[extra credit – 4 PM – Atlas Speakers Series: Help! My avatar was robbed! – 4-500 word blog entry on presentation]
