I gave a presentation today to HCI Researchers at my University in which I tried to explain how designers and artists are taught to create and iterate. The scientists picked up on the potential problems as quickly as we artists do from the inside. View my slideshow here.
For some time now, as I’ve fallen deeper into the academic side of the fine art industries, I’ve struggled to understand the peculiar divide between art in the university and art in the commercial market.
I teach in an area of questionable disciplinary distinctiveness - an area called “New Media.” It’s a subject heading that few are happy with, in or out of the field - and I wonder if it will even be around in a few years. Meanwhile, once a year I have to explain my field to freshmen who are looking for a major. Each year I get better at reducing this fraught area to a few spare words. Here’s this year’s introduction, as a VERY short slideshow below. Read the rest of this entry »
Here are some things I’ve learned the hard way from the past seven years of mandated interdisciplinarity. (I illustrated these lessons in a presentation here on campus last week. In this form, they might read more as platitudes or koans.)
workshop documentation from The Cornell Daily Sun
My workshop at Cornell was on processes of prototyping, collaboration, and critique for interactive art and design work. Read the rest of this entry »
Few would turn a chance to talk about gaming into a talk about University policy and structure. (I don’t do it for love of bureaucracy, believe you me.) The following powerpoint was from a panel on gaming here at UIUC earlier this week. I share this spare structure for those University workers who might also be struggling to relate their institutions to the growing industry of video games. Hope it helps. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll be at Cornell University from October 22-25, doing a workshop for the Art Department and presenting at the Society for the Humanities’ symposium, “Spatialized Networks and Artistic Mobilities.” For the workshop I’ll be trying out some of the techniques for collaboration and prototyping gleaned from work with Piotr Adamczyk, Simon Levin and Laurie Long. Documentation coming soon!
My friend Dick Keyes describes cynicism as an act of “seeing through,” of claiming to perceive the real heart of things, the true motivations behind another’s actions. The cynic proudly and selfishly presumes to know another’s heart, even in the quest for truth. In this light, critique without cynicism looks ever harder. I recently discovered some help for this problem within cybernetics.
branding the microscopic at Tufts
As Sam puts it over at Selil, Research Universities hurting for money at the moment are in a sore predicament of their own design. In the hunt for capital via the generation of intellectual property, they’ve de-emphasized education among the more patent-ready sectors of campus. As an investment in a possible patent-heavy future, Universities freed professors from teaching, hired more staff, appointed more deans and administrators, established more infrastructure.
But even if in a few cases these funding strategies succeeded, there’s not much venture capital left to continue supporting such efforts. Now they’re left holding a pricey enterprise, heavy on personnel and technical maintenance, and light on support in education, their most dependable source of income.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve taught Interaction a few times with mixed success. The struggle of any introductory art class is how to give students hands-on experience with all the dimensions of a new medium or field - technical, formal, conceptual. This time I’m abandoning attempts at synthesis, and just splitting it. We’ll do disegno on Tuesdays - concept, prototype, design, content, metaphor - and techné - sofware, hardware - on Thursdays. In principle I’ve always been against such a split, but I think this might be more than a little appropriate to these students, in this place and time. Follow along here if you care to see what we’re up to. (Using indexhibit for the site, not a great fit for teaching but we’ll see.)