Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841501913 ISBN 13: 9781841501918

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In Educating Artists for the Future, some of the world’s most innovative thinkers about higher education in the arts offer fresh directions for educating artists and designers for a post-digital future. A group of artists, researchers, and teachers from a dozen countries here redefine art at the interdisciplinary interface where scientific inquiry and new technologies shape aesthetic values. This volume offers groundbreaking guidelines for art educators, demonstrating how the interplay between digital and cultural systems calls for alternative pedagogical strategies that encourage student-centered interactive learning.

 

“Mel Alexenberg, a very sophisticated artist and scholar of much experience in the complex playing field of art-science-technology, addresses the rarely asked question: How does the ‘media magic’ communicate content?”—Otto Piene, Professor Emeritus and Director, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 

 

 

 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mel Alexenberg is an artist who creates works at the interface between art, science, technology, and culture. He is the author of many books, including The Future of Art in a Digital Age, also published by Intellect Books.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Educating Artists for the Future

Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture

By Mel Alexenberg

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2008 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-191-8

Contents

Introduction: Education for a Conceptual Age, 
Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture Mel Alexenberg, 
Beyond the Digital, 
Beyond the Digital: Preparing Artists to Work at the Frontiers of Technoculture Stephen Wilson, 
Pixels and Particles: The Path to Syncretism Roy Ascott, 
Sustaining Creativity and Losing the Wild Carol Gigliotti, 
Making Space for the Artist Mark Amerika, 
Networked Times, 
Unthinkable Complexity: Art Education in Networked Times Robert Sweeny, 
Art/Science & Education Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, 
Learning, Education, and the Arts in a Digital World Ron Burnett, 
Afference and Efference: Encouraging Social Impact through Art and Science Education Jill Scott, 
Polycultural Perspectives, 
Expressing with Grey Cells: Indian Perspectives on New Media Arts Vinod Vidwans, 
New Media Art as Embodiment of Tao Wengao Huang, 
Between Hyper-Images and Aniconism: New Perspectives on Islamic Art in the Education of Artists Ismail Ozgur Soganci, 
Touching Light: Post-Traditional Immersion in Interactive Artistic Environments Diane Gromala, 
Art and the Myth of Transparency (MIT Press 2005) and Jinsil Seo, 
Reflective Inquiry, 
Media Golem: Between Prague and ZKM Michael Bielicky, 
Life Transformation – Art Mutation Eduardo Kac, 
Learning Through the Re-embodiment of the Digital Self Yacov Sharir, 
My Journey: From Physics to Graphic Design to User-Interface/Information-Visualization Design Aaron Marcus, 
Emergent Praxis, 
Entwined Histories: Reflections on Teaching Art, Science, and Technological Media Edward A. Shanken, 
A Generative Emergent Approach to Graduate Education Bill Seaman, 
Media Literacy: Reading and Writing Images in a Digital Age Shlomo Lee Abrahmov, 
The Creative Spirit in the Age of Digital Technologies: Seven Tactical Exercises Lucia Leao, 
Epilogue: Realms of Learning, 
From Awesome Immersion to Holistic Integration Mel Alexenberg, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture

Mel Alexenberg

The genesis of this book was an invitation by the renowned mathematicians Tzvi Arad and Bernard Pinchik to create a new School of Art and Multimedia at Netanya Academic College in Israel. I began to develop a proposal for a school in which students redefine art in creative ways at the interdisciplinary interface where scientific inquiry and new technologies shape aesthetic and cultural values – both local and global. Although I have had years of experience in both science and art education, I knew that I needed to explore fresh directions for educating artists for the future in a rapidly changing world where the boundaries between art, science, technology, and culture are becoming diaphanous. What better way to discern these new directions, I thought, than to invite some of the world's most innovative thinkers in higher education in the arts to advise me. This book is their advice. It not only offers invaluable advice for creating new schools, but it provides alternative paths for upgrading and refreshing existing art schools and university art departments worldwide for a post-digital future.

As I studied the diverse chapters exploring alternative futures for educating artists that I received from artists/researchers/teachers working in Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, India, Israel, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States, I began to search for a conceptual framework for organizing this book. My search was interrupted by a meeting in Holland with Charles Esche, Director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Richard Flood, Chief Curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. We were charged with awarding an artist the coveted Wolf Prize, the equivalent in the arts of the Nobel Prize, from among numerous nominations received from throughout the world. The three of us unanimously agreed to award Michaelangelo Pistoletto the prize because of his inventive career as an artist, educator, and activist, whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that address the major technological and cultural changes of our era. In his hometown, Biella, Italy, he established Cittadellarte as a center to inspire artists to produce responsible change in society through transdisciplinary ideas and creative projects. Pistoletto asserts, "Artists have a unique and totally free way of understanding and analyzing society, and consequently of being engaged with it. Cittadellarte firmly believes that art can interact among all the diverse spheres of human activity that form society, and is thereby a generator for responsible transformation of society."

At Schiphol Airport, waiting for my flight home to Tel Aviv, I was struck by four books sharing the main display rack in the airport bookshop: A Whole New Mind, Intelligence Reframed, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and Machine Beauty. They explore some of the same concepts that I had discussed with Esche and Flood in Eindhoven. Browsing through them gave me further food for thought about how to group the chapters in the book and write the introduction for it. It is significant that none of these books were art books. Glancing at the back covers, I saw that they were classified as books in the areas of business, psychology, current affairs, and computer science. It is apparent that new ways for educating artists for the future will be found in a global fabric woven with colorful threads from all fields of human endeavor. Significant threads are revealed in subtitles of the four books.

The subtitles of A Whole New Mind by business consultant Daniel Pink (2006) are "Why Right-brainers will Rule the Future" and "Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age." Pink proposes that we are witnessing a paradigm shift beyond the digital culture of the Information Age to a Conceptual Age in which people in all walks of life will succeed when they behave like artists who integrate left-brain with right-brain thinking. Industrial Age factory workers and Information Age knowledge workers are being superseded by Conceptual Age creators and empathizers who integrate high-tech abilities with high-touch and high-concept abilities. When the president of General Motors states that he is in the art business selling mobile sculpture that incidentally provides transportation, the M.F.A. degree has become more valuable to corporate recruiters than the M.B.A.

"Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century" is the subtitle of Harvard psychology professor Howard Gardner's book, Intelligence Reframed (1999), that describes how artists have always needed to develop their spatial intelligence. Artists of the future, however, will realize that this pattern-recognition mode of thinking is not enough. Spatial intelligence will have to be combined in multiple configurations with bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, naturalist, intrapersonal, interpersonal, spiritual, and existential intelligences.

The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Friedman (2000) is subtitled "Understanding Globalization." He dramatizes the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841501913
• ISBN 13: 9781841501918
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 344
• Herausgeber: Alexenberg Mel
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar