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March 16, 2003
Autonomy and Mass Media
How does an artist maintain creative autonomy while navigating the mass of mass media?
Media literacy involves technical, cultural and creative intervention. Navigating pop culture and understanding what globalization means to individual voice is part of the territory of working creatively in new media. Sustaining an artistic voice demands deep attention to the shifts in society and what technological realms they bring about. Teachers must be prepared to deal with the media-related work that students bring to them. This goes beyond the technical and into meaning, intention and the humanness of making. Teachers should learn how to use this medium as a fluid -- to embrace methods that continue to emerge and reshape the discipline. A new media teacher should also be a practitioner of new art forms such as multimedia for non-liner storytelling; robotics for interactive installations; and the Internet for virtual art. Making their own art will not only provide ideas for their classrooms but also sustain their own creativity.
I am currently revisiting the writing of Guy Debord and the Situationists movement of the early 1950s. I also perceive our media society as a complex network of control mechanisms, which can lead to the distribution of cultural misinformation. The concepts of others such as Marshall McLuhan and Dominic Strinati can translate "mass" to "new" media with remarkable ease. In the last 5 years, discourse on new media literacy has become more available and the work of people such as Kathleen Tyner and Sandy Stone inspire me for their feminist perspective on creative literacy in a digital world. All of these theorists discuss how access to knowledge is becoming more difficult to find due to the ways that new media is accessed and content is distributed. This irony merits attention from anyone using the technological infrastructure we live within, but in particular, visual artists. Information is pushed more in visual form than ever before yet the general population is woefully unprepared to decipher that they are looking at. Formalizing this dialogue through teaching art has rendered a new, rich and creative domain for educators and one that offers an innovative alternative to the current media literacy dialogue.
Is there a visual way in which we can invite art educators to use this on-line discussion? Can our threads be visual rather than text based?
Art educators evaluate curriculum though the rubric of goals, methods, and assessment. How can a website assist with these processes? Is there a rubric for new media educators?
Would it be helpful to focus on the discussion of creating creative autonomy with mass media?
Posted by jen hall at March 16, 2003 02:44 PM
Comments
There is so much food for thought here.
The importance Media Literacy becomes more acute given recent events. Now that we have a highly mediated "real-time" high-tech war unfolding in our living rooms, where do we find the truth? What do we really want to know? I have been concerned for while now about the irresponsibility of feeding un-assessed images and conjecture based on partial facts as news. So much misinformation (or is it simply wishful thinking?) has already clogged the airwaves. To a (media) educated viewer, this may feel like freedom of information, the right to know what is happening when it happens. But, we DON'T know what is really going on and the media doesn't have the answers. This 24/7 obsession seems as much like a ratings war as a desire to give the public an accurate status of what's going on. Perhaps as more US soldiers coming home in body bags and more images of Iraqi "collateral damage" force us to deal with the horror of war, the nightly prime-time bombing raids over Bagdad and the SmartBoard enhanced strategy updates will become a lot less entertaining. Yes, I use the word entertaining.
When an art, communication or humanities teacher has the opportunity to put technology into the hands of students that allows them to express their own voice, the student gains some experience with the manipulation of the media. Just as clay can be molded, so can a POV emerge from the molding and editing of media. If for no other reason than the pursuit of the truth, students should have access to the tools of new media.
Posted by: eleanor at March 24, 2003 12:47 PM
" If for no other reason than the pursuit of the truth, students should have access to the tools of new media."
Yes! Access to information must include media literacy: Decoding what we are they looking at involves both technical and cultural literacy.
Check out this thesis project from last year --
Produced after 9-11. Classroom projects that
Include observation of TV boradcasting
are really valuable -- especially now that
we find ourselves back in war and imersed
in TV documentation. How do we decode
the visual news??
http://www.katebrigham.com/thesis/
Posted by: jen at March 24, 2003 01:46 PM
jen posts: "Is there a visual way in which we can invite art educators to use this on-line discussion? Can our threads be visual rather than text based?"
This is a great question to contemplate. While visual navigation -- specifically, searching -- is a laudable goal worth pursuing and testing, is it necessarily more usable than text-based searching/queries?
Here's one example of a visual searching software: Groxis
Another beta to look at is the Google Viewer search. Test it out at: Google Viewer
Posted by: eleanor at April 22, 2003 01:50 PM
Groxis looks like an amazing tool - has anyone you know actually used it?
Google viewer is a neat tool as well, though
I have found it a bit frustrating to get a
brouser inside of a frame that is was not
designed for --- ironically making somethings
difficult to view.
Posted by: jen at April 23, 2003 10:53 AM
I only ran into the Groxis site the other day but it seems similar to other experiments with (what I see as) a visual/tactile approach to navigation and topic association. While, of course it's not tactile now, but visually it feels like one is physically weaving ideas together, pulling things forward and zooming in on details. I could see this sort of navigating eventually being done via gesture.
The Google viewer seems a bit more like a toy right now, but it can be useful if one is multitasking anyway. It keeps you (at least) from wasting time loading useless, misnamed or missing pages. But, I have cookies turned off (my browser asks me before loading) and the view gets tripped up by that.
Posted by: eleanor at April 23, 2003 02:56 PM
a bit off-topic to the main gist of this post, but an interesting site nonetheless:
compares and "outs" website design thieves. Many of the example here are pretty egregious. Designers have always had difficulty preserving their autonomous style from imitators but the web makes out-right theft of intellectual property rediculously easy... As the music industry can attest to of course! but, it also makes the educators job more difficult. How does one evaluate the originality of student work these days? Process-folios?.
Posted by: eleanor at January 21, 2004 07:11 PM
Certainly, process portfolios are a useful way to make sure students have actually made the work rather than misappropriated entire portions from the intent. Process profiles are also wonderful for looking at how someone has made a work ñ observing what their choices were along the way. Focusing on a student's process rather than their product has always been far more valuable for me as an educator.
The best part of digital art for the educator is the "save as" function. You can ask your students to save the changes in their work along the way, essentially, grabbing their process ñ their choices for changes with each version that is saved. Under every student paining there are a thousand more ñ obscured by opaque pigments and deleted by lines erased. What a wonderful opportunity for a teacher to see how, why and even when a student made the many choices that adds up to the final work.
Posted by: jen at January 22, 2004 02:58 PM