[mtp-teoria] call for discussion intermedia

Tue Jun 26 14:36:50 CEST 2007

I don’t know… but let s figure it out together / third grade educational model on inter-media studies in CR

This paper is designed to be a conversation. I present it as a loose collection of simple ideas, unwinding from my personal experience with lecturing in art schools. The ideas are organized around a several themes: 

Why do we believe that mastering new tools and new technologies brings empowerment to Arts and Artists? 

or

Why do we think that mastering new tools and new technologies brings enforcement to Arts and Artists?

Can the involvement of new media in culture and education liberate us from something? 

To what extent are Arts and Digital culture compatible? 

Is there a realistic discussion going on without involving  ideology, personal preferences, or even belief in the dangerous new brave world, or dawn of techno paradise, where all problems of the mankind will be solved out by developing of  better and stronger apparatus?

The impact of new media and audiovisual techno-culture on Fine Art is ubiquitous and is reframing the ongoing discussion among those who welcome digital culture, and those who have doubts about it. New media and inter-media are fields where the ambivalence of values and attitudes is clear to observe, especially in the current system of education. Art education in the Czech Republic in this art discipline is the main subject of this text. 

I admit I do not have a very clear proposition of how to improve the current situation.Too  many things I frankly don’t know. I hoped to find out from more experienced and educated colleagues. Often the lecturer, suprised by a student’s unexpected question, is afraid to show his incompetence and say “I don’t know”. But knowledge is not something we have—it is rather something that emerges during conversation. 

Alongside the expansion of knowledge-carriers and information networks, a growing number of areas appear which disturb the Holy Authority of the Teacher. 

The sentence “I don’t know” …perhaps can become a new sign of the liberation in education in the next decades.

10 points to Arts and Technology education

1. The systems of the education sector in the Czech Republic - most of the Art academies, Technical universities and humanity faculties, have very little in common. The transition between gymnasiums and high schools and universities is more discontinuous than would be fruitful for students. Those institutions should supposedly be well-oriented in the different aspects and layers of the world today, but it often seems not to be the case. Students can rely on a very limited precedent for mutual interests, knowledge, shared objectives and goals outside of the area of sport and entertainment. Students in technical subjects (with some exceptions) are not taught to be oriented in contemporary culture, literature, theater, visual arts and music, and the courses in humanities are disappearing from the technical schools. Art students are exposed to technology and natural science to a very limited degree, mostly more as users than agents.  

2. This gap in the infrastructure and lack of cross-disciplinary discussion in the academic scene is resulting in a low level of artistic methods, especially in the discipline “new media art” – a type of professional practice which requires often sophisticated, innovative, unorthodox concepts of thinking and work conditions to succeed. 

3. If there is a task for a potential improvement of interdisciplinary education processes and continuous cross-disciplinary practice or research, it can be helpful to draw an outline of a virtual independent platform. 

4. To a great extent art education is still defined by a turbulent but rather mild transition period, following the political take-over in 1989; logically so, through the residue of the tradition and habits of the earlier decades of the totalitarian system. Most of visual or fine art is still considered by the majority of universities, schools and teachers as a subject of practice in design, craft, or in the best case the “free expression of Artists”. Those concepts are preserved in the academic art establishment and imprinted on the younger generation.

The methodology of learning of individual or team research, which has been an integral part of artistic practice in Europe for several centuries, has been substituted by art management and PR strategic abilities; learning how to penetrate art market. 

5. Education in technical disciplines is in large part carried out as a short-minded professional traditionalism aiming to study very specific subject, even gradually adapting to the interests of SW and HW producers and the business sector. Here students are treated more as a possible future employee, than a creative and independently thinking individual. Research is still rather an exclusive section in the academic curriculum.  

6. An alternative interdisciplinary education model, reflecting the counter-currents within contemporary policy, science, technology and culture, should reduce the tendency towards fragmentation and professional reductionism. Such a model needs to break through the indrawn and isolationist way of thinking both in the conservative academic and artistic milieus, where the feeling of exclusion in which experts “newspeak”, competency to one subject of studies and discredit any lay knowledge, is still a standard. 

7. The technical, the social, the esthetic, theoretical and practical issues within the Czech university education system are taught with a minimal notion of interference and awareness of coherence of contemporary knowledge. The subjects, thus the students learn to accept and confirm the role of the highly specialized expert. We are taught to exist in the competitive school system, and not taught to act in a conceptual frame of coexistence, cooperation, dialogue, synergy of disciplines and wide specter of individual attitudes.

Those institutional conditions and concepts of thinking block any challenges, unconventional thoughts and attempts, leading to potential changes in the subject and in society. This is a conflicting situation, since the debate is not only about abstract ideas and institutions in art education, but about the power and positions. 

8. Interdisciplinary or inter-media education in the Czech Republic, inspired by foreign schools, or institutions, needs to be established within the European transnational educational network. The existing connections and exchanges are, even after 15 years, rare. Many lecturers of the middle and older generation working in the Czech high art schools and universities have limited foreign language skills. The consequences of such a disadvantage, to reflect, re-work information, translate and distribute them to pupils, contributes to the distrust and uneven relations between lecturers and students. 

9. Increasing the number of the sites and modalities of knowledge and access to information triggers new questions concerning the trust for the authority of knowledge, producers and control systems, establishing and confirming the “correct” models. Workshops organized by artist and independent technicians initiatives, open universities, and civic educational institutes form a counterbalance to the state establishment. The non-formal, DiY, non-institutional structures can offer a certain correcting factor to the state or private education establishment model, but can never compete with those heavily-funded bodies. Such polarization is not productive for both sides, and for DiY can be even dangerous.  

We are proposing a model to set up a satellite “floating” laboratory, related to the university structure, but with some autonomy, non-rigorous scientific-artistic  structure, opened to nontraditional or experimental DiY methods and elements, which emerged during hands-on practice within the alternative teaching and learning context in recent years. 

10. Inside such a hybrid model, based on the concept of cooperation or coexistence, not on the ideological presumptions, concerning the critique of alternative or mainstream and that of authority, offers a chance to reanimate the existing pedagogical system and to implement a critical approach and interdisciplinary practices. Learning from the social-cultural non-profit sector can serve as a trigger to move out from the conservative institutional approach prevailing in the Czech educational bodies, both in Arts and Technology. Such a hypothetical platform, related to the loose concepts of “University of Openness” could inject new spirit into the field of technologically oriented cultural forms such as new media or inter-media Arts. This cross-disciplinary approach and platform would involve all types of creative people, students, researchers, lay-persons, coming from natural science, humanities, engineering, cybernetics, performing arts, visual arts, sound and light design, psychology, environmental science, etc. 

concept Milos Vojtechovsky, june 2007