DEAF_00 Media Academy Day Report
Report by Nadia Palliser about the DEAF_00 Media Academy Day.
The Media Academy Day highlights the educational aspects of art academies, focusing specifically on questions of multi-media, collaboration and interdisciplinarity. Looking to the future of art academies, wrapped in high bandwidth and wide curricula, teachers and students are developing innovative venues and new spaces for working and playing with new media. Yet, the academy's ambivalence towards the technical determinism of new media and the romantic drive for content and artistic production seems to remain a matter of debate: does the art student only learn how to handle the media or must the art academy also promote an artistic spirit, consistent to the myth of the gifted artist? It seems the 'status' of the artist may be changing but in which way? Does the artist become increasingly and schizophrenically interdisciplinary due to the variety of media? And if so, how might depth be found in a flexible curriculum, moving between different sources of technology and information?
Frans Evers from the Interfaculty of Sound and Image in The Hague
started off the presentation, giving an auto-biographical account of his
adventures in sound and image. After working as a developmental
psychologist in the field of synaesthaesia and experimenting in fringe
electronica at the same time, Evers started working at the conservatory
of the Hague in the mid eighties, also housing the Institute of
Sonology, founded by Dick Raaymakers in 1966 (The institute initially
started off in collaboration with the University of Utrecht and moved to
the conservatory of The Hague in 1986). Working together with
Raaymakers, leaning more towards education than research, Evers set up a
Centre of Audio-Visual media. He organized unconventional events of
sound and image - reliving the sixties and the atmosphere of performance
- as in the eventful visit of John Cage (November 1988) provoking
random happenings all over the school. In 1993, the Interfaculty of
Sound and Image was formed in a merger between the art academy and the
conservatory of the Hague. A curriculum of recording and composing
techniques was devised, while events were organized simultaneously.
Recreating Schönberg's project "Die Glückliche Hand" (1912), for
example, a media-version of light crescendo and music was produced. Also
playing with Mondriaan's utopic ideas on music and with the aeolian
piano, students were motivated to look and hear deeper into their
material. Evers showed a few works of the students at the Interfaculty:
kaleidoscopic images, jumping into data matrixes, video material and a
recording of the Sonic Acts festival in the Paradiso (1999). Initiatives
for interdisciplinary crossovers are being developed at present,
perhaps as a collaboration between the University of Leiden, the
Conservatory, the Art Academy and the Interfaculty - grand schemes for
the near future.
MECAD, a new media centre in Sabadell-Barcelona
was founded in September 1998. Coinciding with the creation of a new
degree in Electronic Art and Digital Design, ESDI, Mecad lends support
to these new studies, focusing primarily on digital and
telecommunications enable unprecedented aesthetic experiences. The
network is a structural metaphor for the school: they wish to offer a
multi-directional curriculum of new media subjects, a dispersive nexus
of media education. Since institutional models seem obsolete and
inoperative, other forms are sought, thoroughly based on the technical
possibilities of the new media at hand. Demonstrating the CD-Rom -
Artevision, metaphors of 'delight', 'energy' and 'the bubble' gave
access into an extensive domain of historical and contemporary
information on Spanish artists (between the '60's and 90's) and their
use of different (new) media. For example Jose Val del Omar (1958) who
experimented in abstract cinema or tactile vision, as he called it
himself. Net-work was shown - elaborating on the "click it, click it
good syndrome"; these were flat images concerning the artist's mother -
all too freudian, however random the digital medium might be. Somehow
the drive for content and artistic production seemed to collide
uncomfortably with the media-specific subjects at the school: technology
itself was in fact the problem as opposed to the use of technology to
make artistic products with content. Is this not one and the same thing
however? To return to the familiar ambivalence between technology and
the use of technique favours the creative artist of avant-garde
proportions; is the latter not something the 21st century and its new
media have the potential to transform?
The Kunsthochschule für
Medien (founded in 1990) in Cologne, breathes Brechtian sophistication,
as a laboratory of testing media and fantasies. Promoting the spirit of
the free experiment and embracing all areas of audio-visual media,
heterogeneity is emphasized with Siegfried Zielinski's monumental
statement running through the school - "There is no master form of
expression". The change in industry - provoking a switch from hard to
soft media - enables a mixture of activities and events to coincide and
explode in an academy of fine arts, design, film and theory. The
question of interdisciplinarity lies more with the students themselves
than in the curriculum: "If there is interdisciplinarity, people are
very undisciplined." Andreas Walter showed a few of his works, one of
which was inspired by Vilém Flusser, approaching time as a communicative
code: the novel, the image and the video were taken as three different
forms of encoding and decoding, finding the rhythm of its time-based
form and interlocking them on plasma screens. An archive of documents
and letters by Vilém Flusser is now accessible at the school and will
soon be online for all to visit.
The Frank Mohr Institute,
Groningen, strives to find both openness and isolation in their
curriculum, playing with experimentation but trying to simultaneously
give theoretical support as an academy. The all too familiar dialectics
of art and design as opposed to science, art history as opposed to
future, discipline as opposed to interdisciplinarity were presented, the
teacher fumbling with a plastic sheet, the projector being out of
order. The students, on the other hand, Julian van Alderen en Arno
Coenen (now graduated and showing work at Mama - The Last Road Trip)
excessively moved with the medium, inspired by old-time computer
aesthetics - flat digital spaces of green matrices with of without
interactive purpose. The communicative gap between theory and practice
seemed immense: the school offered "polariteiten" of art and technology
on the one hand while the projects seemed completely immersed in
hightech on the other, presenting a video by Arno Coenen - Deus Ex
Machina - and the internet project "Nine Nerds" - a collective of
net-based students.
IAMAS, a Japanese media art academy, seeks a
merger between Art and Science, cultivating minds as well as computing
techniques. Combining the laboratory with the school, the emphasis lies
especially on interactivity and developing new interfaces through the
digital medium. Many works were shown at the Media Academy Day - for
example a media device for a Handscroll, of which the original could no
longer be handled. The interface allowed the user to move the scroll
him/herself, hear the poet recite the scroll and find information on its
history. The teacher, being a philosopher, seemed especially excited by
these possibilities, finding richness of thought within the complexity
of media and the memory of different traditions and philosophical
expressions.
After the array of educational initiatives within
media art academies, the qualities of interdisciplinarity remain
ambiguous nonetheless. As much as new academies strive to create
interdisciplinary curricula, the dilemma between depth of
media-knowledge and an all-round surface-like media education seems
apparent. Avoiding modernist medium specificity, traditionally found at
the basis of the art academy, yet bombarded by technical know-how on new
media, academies waver between ideological and practical education.
While teaching the student how to handle the variety of media, the wish
to infuse the student with an artistic drive of some kind continues. Is
the latter not a residue of the romance of the avant garde? And will the
status of the artist change once this is discarded? Weary of such
questions, the academies were only sure of one thing: the
interdisciplinary factor could only be found in the actual collaborative
projects of the academies, where different disciplines worked and
communicated together. By combining layers of fantasy, history, media
and memory, immaterial richness might be found in and through new media
education.
