semeiotica recombining contemporary art, design strategy and life science
March 3, 2007 at 11:13 am
· Filed under network entrepreneurship, teaching and learning
In response to Mel Alexenberg’s post on the YASMIN discussion forum, I was prompted to discuss how I became interested in the intersections of art and biology as a way of understanding future possibilities for artist education. Here is my response:
In all honesty, I’m not sure how my interests in the intersections of art, science, and technology started. Perhaps I was simply unable to single out a single discipline for study. When I started at the University, my stated interests were communications and botany. My courses ranged from biology to photography and ceramics to film theory in those early years. Because I was increasingly interested in environmental justice, I started looking for ways to leverage the content of these areas and my skills in service to environmental justice issues.
During an educational exchange in Northern California, I was exposed to the conflict between industrial logging and ecological interests. This was the period in which Julia Butterfly had occupied Luna, a large redwood tree, as one of many ongoing direct action protests against irresponsible commercial logging operations. My commitments at the time came from my interactions with instructors and classmates at Humboldt State University where I was studying deep ecology and photography. My creative work became directed at finding visual ways of communicating sublime ecological and evolutionary interactions among community members–of all species. Eventually, I decided that I needed to know more about the scientific explanations for evolution and ecology. I studied ecology, evolution, and behavior at Indiana University for the next six years.
My experiences as a developing biologist brought me closer to some common threads among biology and art. I became interested in how art and design can inform and communicate scientific research, the role of biological signaling as an indicator of health and/or attractiveness, and the similar role that repetition has in the creation and study of art, genomics, and behavior. Following these threads has led to my current research including a forthcoming article on the relationship between the cinema and genomics (in Leonardo, forthcoming).
Finding a community that shared an interest in and the values of research at these intersections was key. I was fortunate to happen upon the SPARK! Festival in South Kensington in 2000, when organizations from the Royal College of Art, the Wellcome Trust, the Museum of Natural History, and especially the Victoria and Albert Museum were organizing and promoting public events aimed at dialogue and integration. Later, I attended the Art/Science Collaboration Inc. conference in NYC in November, 2001. I was then able to begin connecting within my own country. My involvement in the Leonardo Education Forum has allowed me to, at the very least, contribute to a landscape where new students have a resource for asking questions.
In some respects, I feel that I have strayed from my environmental justice roots. Maybe it has just been a shift in focus from ecosystems to genomics and how the human community recognizes and interacts with scientific methods for portraying nature. For some reason, I’ve always viewed art as a way to incorporate methods beyond the scientific into the social discourse surrounding biology-related concerns. How, for example, can interdisciplinary collaborative groups be innovative or take into account more perspectives. I started to recognize that my role as an artist involves what it called network entrepreneurship, which is not so much the creative aspects of making things so much as it entails the behaviors that allow the transfer of tools, methods, and language from one discipline and community into another (e.g. from biology into art and design or vice-versa). This leads me to my interest in pedagogy. I’m interested in how to develop methods for teaching and learning that promote network entrepreneurship and other ways of building relationships among diverse community members and commitments. This can be through art and science–as the perceived conflict also provides a much opportunity for resolution and mutual cooperation.
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You’d enjoy my newest book.
EDUCATING ARTISTS FOR THE FUTURE:
Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture
Mel Alexenberg, Editor
(Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2008)
In UK: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/ppbooks.php?isbn=9781841501918
In USA: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/278940.ctl
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: EDUCATION FOR A CONCEPTUAL AGE
Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture
- Mel Alexenberg, Professor of Art and Founding Dean, School of Art and Multimedia, Netanya Academic College, Netanya, Israel. (author of The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness, Intellect Books, 2006)
BEYOND THE DIGITAL
Beyond the Digital: Preparing Artists to Work at the Frontiers of Technoculture
- Stephen Wilson, Professor and Director of Conceptual/Information Arts Program, San Francisco State University, California, USA, (author of Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, MIT Press, 2002)
Pixels and Particles: The Path to Syncretism
- Roy Ascott, President, Planetary Collegium and Professor, University of Plymouth, UK. (author of Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, University of California Press, 2003, and editor of Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research)
Sustaining Creativity and Losing the Wild
- Carol Gigliotti, Associate Professor of New Media, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Making Space for the Artist
- Mark Amerika, Associate Professor of Art and Art History, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA, (author of META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, MIT Press, 2007)
NETWORKED TIMES
Unthinkable Complexity: Art Education in Networked Times
- Robert Sweeny, Assistant Professor of Art and Art Education, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA, USA
Art/Science & Education
- Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, Professor and Head of the International MA Program in ePedagogy, University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. (author of (e)Pedagogy-Visual Knowledge Building: Rethinking Art and New Media in Education, Peter Lang, 2005)
Learning, Education and the Arts in a Digital World
- Ron Burnett, President of Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, (author of How Images Think, MIT Press, 2004)
Afference and Efference: Encouraging Social Impact through Art and Science Education
- Jill Scott, Research Professor: Institute for Cultural Studies in Art, Media and Design, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich, Switzerland, and Vice Director, Z-Node, Planetary Collegium. (author of Artistsinlabs: Exploring the Interface Between Art and Science, Springer, 2006)
POLYCULTURAL PERSPECTIVES
Expressing with Grey Cells: Indian Perspectives on New Media Art
- Vinod Vidwans, Professor and Head of Departments of New Media and Software User Interface Design, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India
New Media Art as Embodiment of Tao
- Wengao Huang, Associate Professor of Media Art, College of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University at Weihai, China
Between Hyper-Images and Aniconism: New Perspectives on Islamic Art in the Education of Artists
- Ozgur Sogancy, Assistant Professor of Fine Art Education, Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey
Touching Light: PostTraditional Immersion in Interactive Artistic Environments
- Diane Gromala, Professor and Associate Director of the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada. Co-author of Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art and the Myth of Transparency (MIT Press 2005), and
- Jinsil Seo, PhD Candidate, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University
REFLECTIVE INQUIRY
Media Golem: Between Prague and ZKM
- Michael Bielicky, Professor and Head of the Department of InfoArt/Digital Media, Hochschule fur Gestaltung, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, and Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, Czech Republic
Life Transformation – Art Mutation
- Eduardo Kac, Professor and Chairman, Art and Technology Department, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA (author of Telepresence & Bio Art, University of Michigan Press, 2005)
Learning Through the Re-embodiment of the Digital Self
- Yacov Sharir, Associate Professor of Dance and Multimedia Art, University of Texas at Austin, USA
My Journey: From Physics to Graphic Design to User-Interface/Information-Visualization Design
- Aaron Marcus, President Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A), and Visiting Professor of Media Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA (author of Graphic Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces, Addison-Wesley, 1991)
EMERGENT PRAXIS
Entwined Histories: Reflections on Teaching Art, Science, and Technological Media
- Edward A. Shanken, Professor of Art History, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia, USA (editor of Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, University of California Press, 2003)
A Generative Emergent Approach to Graduate Education
- Bill Seaman, Professor and Head of Department of Digital Media, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, USA
Media Literacy: Reading and Writing Images in a Digital Age
- Shlomo Lee Abrahmov, Senior Lecturer in Design and Instructional Systems Technologies, Holon Institute of Technology, Holon, Israel
The Creative Spirit in the Age of Digital Technologies: Seven Tactical Exercises
- Lucia Leao, Professor of Art and Technology, Department of Computer Science, Sao Paulo Catholic University, and SENAC, Brazil (author of Derivas: Cartografias do Ciberespaço, Annablume, 2004)
EPILOGUE: REALMS OF LEARNING
From Awesome Immersion to Holistic Integration
- Mel Alexenberg, Former Associate Professor of Art and Education, Columbia University, Chairman of Fine Arts, Pratt Institute, Dean of Visual Arts, New World School of the Arts, Miami, and Research Fellow, MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, USA
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