Sometime this evening (Bangalore standard time) HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation announce the winners of the digital media and learning initiative. Last October, CEMA submitted a proposal designed to create knowledge-networking at the intersections of art, science, and technology. You can read the main part of the proposal below. Things like these always seem a both awkward when you’ve been distanced from it for awhile, but it’s surprising just how closely the proposal matches our activities these days. In upcoming posts, I’ll be writing about and sharing images from some of those activities.

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The IDEOGRAM project proposes the development and implementation of epistematic architecture for knowledge-networking at the intersections of art, science, and technology. Epistematic architecture is information technology that scaffolds our ability to create new knowledge. We intend to make visible the connections, activities, and characteristics of the Leonardo/ISAST network and its affiliates, to learn from them, and to recontextualize this knowledge into solutions for doing informal science. Our goal is to connect the benefits of digital media and learning to underrepresented communities, provide creative mechanisms for redressing their concerns via informal science, and incorporate these concerns into the epistematic architecture project.

We propose to situate the project in the CEMA lab in Bangalore, India (see below). This will facilitate additional perspectives as we implement social frameworks and technologies to reach our goals. In this manner, we hope to more closely involve local individuals in India whose disengagement with science and technology can stimulate creative interactions and help bridge knowledge-networking gaps.

The Leonardo network is composed of 8000+ individuals and organizations from across the globe and whose engagement of science and technology characterizes their creative work. Using existing and lab-built technologies, we intend to make the network’s creative activities available as a medium for understanding how science and technology are leveraged in the cultural landscape. For example, what are individuals looking at, searching for, reading or doing? Do the metaphors used to couple knowledge vary with age? We will connect these semantic patterns to inform tactical media projects and recontextualize digital media and learning for local situations. Tactical media solutions could involve anything from creative visualizations and physical computing to social technologies.

Combining the characteristics of digital networks with local epistemologies and embodiments creates scaffolds for positive interactions among groups typically isolated for reasons of geography, age, or educational level. Scenarios for these interactions include:

• Artists, philosophers and space scientists from six countries working to provide data feeds for informal science during an upcoming mission to the moon,
• Retired scientists and policy makers working with cultural entrepreneurs to find new opportunities for engaging the public over health issues,
• Artists working in tissue culture create a meatless steak from one’s own cells, thereby providing a personal protein alternative for vegetarians, or
• Engineers and artists developing an inexpensive and portable science lab for schoolchildren to informally explore their world in and beyond the slums of India.

The exciting thing is that aspects of these scenarios are already being carried out. However, because the information/epistematic architecture linking these activities is solely the result of volunteer work, they have lacked the financial and institutional support necessary to bring them to a critical level of exposure.

Contributions to the field of digital media and learning include some of the methods we will use to accomplish this goal.

• Recognizing identities, behaviors, artifacts, and environmental influences that characterize knowledge-networking at the intersections of art, science and technology.
• Identifying objects that permeate community boundaries and coordinate diverse concerns.
• Creating new relational and interactive opportunities.
• Using individual and community characteristics to suggest opportunities for building connectivity across educational, national, income-level, and disciplinary boundaries.
• Semantic networking and making individual concerns visible can suggest emerging trends, paradigms, and models of cultural introgression.
• Questioning model knowledge-networkers to assess their relative roles as translators, naïve participants, and/or catalysts.
• Antagonizing new models of scholarship and peer-review to make use of digital media and create opportunities for underrepresented scholars.