A shift towards collaboration

When I initiated this research site in the Fall of 2020, life for many was in a state of upheaval. COVID-19 was spreading uncertainty and death across the globe. The murder of George Floyd earlier that Spring had resulted in protests against police brutality and white supremacy in the US and in many other countries. The 2020 Presidential election brought with it an increase in political division and social unrest.

At my university, the Fall of 2020 also saw an unprecedented number of retrenchment letters delivered to tenure-track and tenured faculty. With these retrenchments came a university-wide restructuring which saw the closing of many ‘underperforming’ programs, including all Masters-level programs in the Department of Art and Design.

Each of these events deeply affected me. Personally, I felt that my ability to curtail a global pandemic could be achieved by wearing a mask and getting vaccinated against COVID-19, even though these acts are small in scale. Professionally, my ability to bring about meaningful social change would be best achieved by continuing to scrutinize my own teaching through the lens of anti-racist approaches to teaching and learning. In addition, I felt that the changing landscape of higher education in my state, and the US in general, required a shift in my approach to research. I therefore decided to focus on working more collaboratively with artists, designers, art educators, and researchers.

In the Winter of 2020 I reached out to a number of colleagues in the field of art education, to see if they had any interest in working in a similar manner. Many were enthusiastic about the possibilities that this collaboration would provide for them, their students, and the field of art education in general. As a result, the Digital Visual Studies website has shifted from being an outlet for my personal research, towards a collaborative research site for like-minded individuals to share ideas, collaborate on research projects, and gather resources.

One year after setting up the Digital Visual Studies site, I am eager to see the how the site will evolve and change through collaboration by the participants. Please look at ‘Who is Digital Visual Studies’ for more information on the current list of collaborators. We will be announcing projects for 2022 in the near future. Also, if you are interested in becoming a collaborator, please email bob@digitalvisualstudies.net for more information on how you can contribute to the site.

Digital Visual Studies

My previous post points to the possibilities that digital artistic practices might provide to art educators. I have started with these examples because they are relevant to our current age. It is my explicit goal, throughout this text, to make reference to digital visual artists who identify as Black or Latino/a, as they are all too often left out of conversations of new media theory and practice. I do this as an art educator who identifies as white, who is well-aware of the privileges that this identification has provided. This emphasis will not change systemic racism or patriarchal structures that have been in place for centuries. I am not sure exactly what this emphasis will change, but I know that I need to use the platform that I have to acknowledge these individuals.

Most importantly, I am making reference to these artists because they make the type of art that I have been found compelling for the past twenty years: art that is confrontational, art that is confusing, art that uses a variety of technologies to point out the dysfunctional aspects of systems that are designed to function at the most efficient level possible. This self-reflexivity is one of the most intriguing attributes of digital visual art. (Manovich, 2000; Crowther, 2008). Digital visual art is the term that I will use on this research site to describe art that is made with, or about, digital media. I am using this term as it is less burdened that some of the other, more specific terms that have been used in the recent past: interactive media, computer art, new media, net.art. I am using the word visual in the phrase, so that it references more traditional works of art, as well as digital visual culture, even though many works of digital visual art downplay the visual aspects of the work being presented. 

Digital visual culture is, simply put, the myriad cultural forms of visual expression that make use of digital technologies. Digital visual culture encompasses many interrelated fields and practices; at its core, digital visual culture is an offshoot of visual culture. My research has dealt with intersections between visual culture topics as diverse as surveillance, performance art and reality TV, data visualization, and videogames. I have written about each of these topics as they relate to art educational history, theories of curriculum design, and K-12 pedagogical approaches. As I have written about each of these topics, they have changed, often while I was in the process of writing. While this presents certain challenges, it also opens up new opportunities to reassess that which has been researched and written. This is one of the motivating factors for this book.

Another motivating factor is the need that I have seen during my time as a public school art educator and professor of art education in higher education. When discussing the topic of digital technology, there are many resources that attend to practical matters, such as: How can I use layers in Photoshop? What is the best resolution for videos that are posted to YouTube? What do I do if my 3D printer does not 3D print? I have asked these questions myself, and have found the answers on the internet. The internet has become an amazing repository for information on digital media, not to mention traditional media. There are also quite a few excellent references that address the theoretical aspects of digital media. These are often written from the fields of media studies, philosophy, and cultural studies. In addition, there are a number of texts that address digital technologies in a number of educational fields. These frame aspects of the digital as instructional technologies. Theories that concern the digital in art education often derive from this last field, although you can find those that are influenced by the previously-mentioned fields as well.

There is a need for research that draws together these two types of resources: the practical and the theoretical, and that does so in a manner that does not alienate or obfuscate. I see my current research as doing just this. As I have been able to reflect upon my previous research writings in the field of art education, I have seen where they have successfully drawn together theory and practice, which has always been my goal. I also now see where my writings have missed the mark, either by weighing too heavily on one approach or the other. This book project tries to strike this balance, by writing primarily for the K-12 practitioner, the pre-service art education professor in higher education, and the media arts student.

My goal is to speak to the unique qualities of digital visual culture in this book. These qualities  – temporality, theory and practice, and multilinearity – are not unique to digital visual culture. However, they are more common to this field of study than to visual culture in general, primarily due to the nature of digital media. I am not interested in arresting the dynamic aspects of digital media, isolating them and immobilizing them in order to study them. I am more interested in surveying them as they currently operate, looking to the influences that have brought them to where they now are, and speculating as to where they might lead. These motivations, when taken as a whole, speak less to the general contours of a digital visual culture, and more to the study of digital visual culture. As such, I am calling this book, and the approaches contained within, Digital Visual Studies.

Now are the times for net.art

As US schools prepare to open for the 2020 -2021 school year, the COVID-19 global pandemic is forcing art educators to rethink many of their practices. This Fall, 11 of the 15 largest school systems in the US will solely use distance learning, affecting over 2.8 million students (1).

Art educators are also rethinking the relationship between their practices and social justice; many are specifically concerned with the oppression of black people in the United States and how this influences art educational practices. The killing of George Floyd on May 25, at the hands of police in Minneapolis MN, sparked protests that have expressed rage at this specific injustice, as well as serving as a platform for larger calls for the defunding of the police and legal justice reform. These protests have aligned with the COVID-19 pandemic in a number of ways. Both point out that systemic racism has resulted in Black and Brown people in the US being more likely to die from COVID-19, and more likely to die at the hands of the police.

While these issues are opening up space for long-neglected conversations to be had, and now that distance education is more common than ever, it is time for art educators to embrace art that speaks to racial injustice and oppression, and that is also made to be viewed at a distance. Art that is ‘born digital’ (2). Net.art.

The beginnings of net.art can be traced back to the early 1990’s, when the World Wide Web was starting to open up to a wider audience. The term itself is credited to Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic, who reported that it was the result of a computer glitch (3). Early examples of net.art were primarily text-based, due to the data limitations of the early WWW. As home computers became more powerful, net.art began to incorporate images, eventually incorporating video. With the rise of mobile computing came the ability for place-based visualizations, usually in the form of augmented reality such as Pokemon Go.

Net.art tends to be made by artists who identify as white. While this is not remarkable, considering that an estimated 85% of artists represented in US museums are white (4), it does challenge the idea that the internet was to be a space for increased representation and visibility. While this disparity exists, there have been a number of important works made by People of Color.

Keith and Mendhi Obadike speak to aspects of race as it functions and serves to reaffirm power and privilege on the internet. They have archived their 20 years of net.art at http://www.blacknetart.com

Jennifer Chan explores issues of consumerism and race through a variety of contemporary artistic practices. Her work “addresses gender and race politics in reaction to the media’s promise of happiness. (5)” Her work can be found at: http://jennifer-chan.com/recent/

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz uses YouTube as a platform for video art that speaks to representation in the art world. Her performance persona Chuleta is her performative outlet for reflections on current topics in the gallery-based contemporary art system: https://www.raimundiart.com

These artists are only a small representation of the important work that has been done by net.artists on race and digital technology. Art educators who are currently looking for way to open up important conversations about race at the same time that they are challenged by the lack of face-to-face contact might find excellent opportunities for engagement with art and artists in the 30 years of net.art. Much of this art has been archived at Rhizome.org (6), but there are numerous outlets for net.art out there.

The time for art educators to use net.art is now.

1. School Districts’ Reopening Plans: A Snapshot (2020, July 15). Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from https://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/school-districts-reopening-plans-a-snapshot.html

2. Ryan M. Patton, & Aaron D. Knochel. (2017). VAR Born Digital Editorial. Visual Arts Research, 43(1), V-Xiv. doi:10.5406/visuartsrese.43.1.000v

3. http://www.easylife.org/netart/

4. https://news.artnet.com/market/new-study-shows-us-art-museums-grappling-with-diversity-1467256

5. http://front.bc.ca/events/jennifer-chan-2/

6. Rhizome has recently published a guide for activists using digital media as a space of resistance, which is available at https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/jun/03/digital-resources-for-a-movement-against-police-violence/