HW#3_6/7: COMMENTS

This exercise brought back fond memories of MySpace in its heyday. For an Internet minute, people threw themselves with abandon into the creative community-building through commenting. Before the process formalized into a component of SEO practice, reciprocating idea-exchanges in short>long bursts with the tiered forms under posted images, videos, music and texts produced virtuous social effects with real promise for shaping small>big all-directional discourse. The process-structure was rooted in cyclic democratic/free speech and enabled by HTML, then other widgets, embedded in constantly improving skins and code (i.e., CSS). It didn't take long for the myriad of inventions/conventions for social media commenting congealed into a mass phenomenon that became a target for the virtual extraction/exploitation complex. Over time, the medium (commenting) was consumed by trolls, spammers, bots, surveillance ops, strategic market analysts/promoters, trend generators and manipulators and worse - predators. Now unmoderated or undermoderated comments fields feel like ghetto streets after midnight. It was refreshing to re-visit a safe zone, this one created by/for NMNF. A thought: our comments/assignment-project feels a bit gated-community, doesn't it? (...Not a judgment; just an observation)

TECH NOTE: I apologize to the class for not solving my own unintentional closed-door policy for commenting on posts within this blog. I realized too late that my site settings conflicted with this blog's settings. My NMNF settings show "Comments On," but I may have disabled comments in general admin, in response to the brutal array of interventions/hacks/etc directed at this site and others in my AFH network during and after my involvement in Occupy Wall Street. Some of those exploited the comments sections in sites with soc_med capacity to undermine our creative community-building efforts within and external to the movement. At some point I vaguely recall shutting down all comments fields on all AFH/PJM-affiliated sites to the extents practicable. Ultimately, I essentially abandoned soc_med (almost) entirely, after concluding that most centralizing platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, et al.) were co-opted/-ing tools of forces I believe are anti-art/-democracy/-community/-freedom etc.

HW#4_6/6: COURSE REFLECTION

New Media, New Forms has provided me many challenging opportunities to revisit art and technology through the lens of education. The course and perspective [art/tech/ed combo], staged the discourse of New/Media-Forms in subtle variance with art-tech-centric modalities, and with the conversations situating theory as the mediator for both art & tech. I found this shift awakened and expanded unexplored territories for practice and thinking about many facets of my 4D+ art approach. At the same time the class added to my artistic skill-set (e.g., with introductory training in 3D printing, laser cutting, basic circuitry, etc), provisioning new directions I plan to explore in production. Through NMNF I encountered platforms and pedagogy that were unfamiliar and suggestive of neglected areas in my skill-set - always a good sign for this student! I found the exchanges in each class to be almost entirely respectful and often compelling. The in-class discussions blended nicely with the informative readings attaching to the syllabus. To summarize, after I reviewed my CTC statement of purpose and thought about my objectives for NMNF, I am satisfied with the progress made in the intensive course, which Richard Jochum, our instructor, indicated is a survey for Creative Technologies program.

"Drew" [For "SELFIE," the Impact 25 project by PJM for NMNF, Summer 2017]

I have struggled at times to adapt to the educational orientation of NMNF. I have found it difficult, but rewarding to sort through that struggle, and to discover more about it. Frequent, congenial, frank (and ongoing) discussions with Professor Jochum have provided me helpful guidance in navigating these difficulties. Through these talks, Richard and I have been able to identify the main factors contributing to my problems adapting to the art/tech/ed paradigm. Coming as I do from a production artist background, informed by prodigious research/theoretical pursuits, I - for example - do not approach tasking the same way someone whose primary expertise is classroom instruction might do. That art production and creative ed do not share identical objectives, beyond the abstract/macro (i.e., "cultural enrichment," etc.) is not much arguable. However, the tech-factor flattens the fields at field-convergent points of shared gear, software, sometimes processes and to a certain degree "users," clients and stakeholders, etc. Society writ large, at least ideally (from an assumed "enlightened" democratic perspective), as in ought-to-be, equally invested in art and education. How technology figures into the mix seems to be exactly what Creative Technologies at CTC is designed to explore.

"Wovenform7" converted to Illustrator file for laser cutting output.

The "drivers" for an artist are not entirely or necessarily identical to the motivations and aspirations for achievement, as it is defined by and for teachers and the students of teaching. Therefore, the methods and sensibilities right for studio production may not work in the academic setting. The intensity, work ethic and focus I bring to the production studio did not at first translate well to the playful approach to the course work/material assigned by Professor Jochum. I tended to overdo assignments, relative to Richard's suggested time-parameters for them and for the coursework in toto. By the final class, truth be told, I still hadn't managed to align my output to the metrics of NMNF, which the professor frequently reminded us was meant to be a function of "fun" - in the spirit of "play." However, the exercise of attempting to modulate my work/output intensity proved valuable and yielded interesting results. The most obvious instance of this mannered flow-change is evidenced in the re-direction of my Impact 25 project, from the concept "My Favorite Move," to the completed "SELFIE." The former is better suited for a 3-month+ full production timetable, etc., and the latter was more or less executed overnight. In the rear view mirror, "Selfie" is still a worthwhile, valuable undertaking, for a number of reasons.

Another divergence is located in what I might characterize as craft-sense, which is a relative of craftsmanship. Through NMNF, primarily via interactions with peer-students, I developed a keener sensitivity to potential variegation in responses to the New Media genre, its tools, history, politics, psych-/anthro-/sociology, theory and so forth. The forms of New Media are not uniform, and no agent owns the massive scenario unfolding in both Real and Virtual Time under the umbrella of that term (New Media). My fixation on Time and other concerns (e.g., astronomy, physics, an emergent 4D practicum and embedded, if marginalized art history, etc.), as mapped in my texts for the Oxford/Ruskin application [Fall/Winter 2016-7], barely appeared in the scope of NMNF. The orientation of theory-practice I've been committed to since the mid-00s is not the orientation, I found represented in and around my first CTC/CT course. Instead I discovered what for me is a whole "world" and space, inhabited by people whose interests are directed at solving very different problems, with another body of ideas, set of practices and historical perspectives, whose science is faceted differently than the one in which I had become comfortable without noticing, without knowing it. The scales and scopes, abbreviations and buzzwords, even the anecdotal mannerisms differ from those with which I am fluent. In my discussions with Richard, and some of my fellow students, I needed to ask questions about what for them were mundane matters in the vernacular. Fortunately, almost all my requests for explanations were answered kindly and tolerantly. I found that career teachers make excellent co-learners. I am not sure my "art world," which frequently seems to reward snark and the curmudgeon, has taught me some of the fine qualities I see in the CTC demographic.

Probably most importantly, in NMNF I got comfortable with being uncomfortable, and by the final week, had accepted those aspects of practical conversion I can accommodate at once, those that might take longer, and those that might not happen. Again, the most vital aspect in this process was regular communication with Professor Jochum. Within the syllabus/curriculum I discovered wiggle room in which to operate in a sort of hybrid mode. I think this blog demonstrates the benefits of activating the interstices among disciplines, which today exists in the body, the forms of New Media.

HW#4_5/6: TECH IN THE CURRICULUM

Rarely is an argument made for the comparative invisibility of technology in the classroom. I think the prime concern for education remains the welfare of each student in a general sense, which will merge into the flows of society in very specific ways. Does technology make us better people, better citizens? Pedagogy and its philosophical foundations at every academic level must prioritize the questions of values and meaning, over the fictional pragmatism of value and means. Where is the analysis of the emphatic educational attention to naming and numbering in learning? Where is the critique of property as a central premise to social structuring, along with the critique of command/control protocols, and extraction/exploitation regimes? The framing of these issues is enabled by technology/media today, but that is not sufficient an explanation for the classroom. Making technology visible in learning environments should not be a band-aid solution for a host of problems undermining our students' and teachers' freedoms, health and inherent worth. Schools can be the place where commonwealth is practiced as a shared principle, evidenced in behavior, codes, and architecture, plus more.

I would advocate for the prominence of technology, of handicraft in the technical academy. I would advocate for civics, deportment and benignly monitored recess in schools a priori the student's entering the technological dispensary. If nothing else, the STEM thing is reminding us how much vital material/immaterial is not covered in that anagram. I adore, have been seduced, by many things tech. I am wedded to some paramount notions of goodness that no technology can touch, because those notions do not need technologies, or even techniques, to improve them. They are not dependent on means. They are contingent on one's humanity, or more to the point, they are bound to whether one is capable of being humane, and acting as such. Education must first teach us and our children what it is to be humans, singularly and together. When we cannot agree on that, society as such dissolves, along with comity, civility, goodwill and many other features of life worth living. I would like to see comity, civility, goodwill, etc., in the classroom before I wish to see technology there. Without those, technology is apt to be just another weapon deployed for ill purpose for one and all, to the benefit of a few over the rest.

HW#4_4/6: READING TAKEAWAYS

The Spirit of Free Play seems to underpin much of the discussion of New Technologies/Media for creative education, counter-weighted by cautionary notations on the potential social perils those same technologies and media engender, individually and collectively. Tinkering was once a quaint notion, attaching to fun but productive or inventive happening in the interstices between preponderant periods of dutiful labor. Free time and free play were generally thought to be the reforming promise of technology. It is readily apparent that the distributions of leisure are not proving equitable. Yet, the redeeming nature of the artistic enterprise, a basic feature of human expression, consistently refuses to be crushed or obliterated, popping up like a whack-a-mole even in the most grim places and times. whatever pressure and tyranny may be applied to it. Perhaps it serves us to consider how little people actually require to enjoy visceral fulfillment. No less true, is that - for sustainable social existence - we can insist that freedom of expression is essential for just living, and technology as such is a secondary consideration in assessing whether one's communal environment supports expressive justice, or does not, and how.

HW#4_2/6: BASIC CIRCUIT PROJECT

...With an assist from CTC Creative Technologies student Trisha Barton: