Rerooting the electronic platforms: Serving the emancipation of art students in the age of the medium is the message.

Author(s):

Tiago Assis(presenting / submitting)Tiago Pinho(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 02 B, Arts Education and Technologies

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-02

15:15-16:45

Room:

B111 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Fernando Hernández-Hernández

Contribution

This project is based on two main branches. A branch that is working electronic platforms for arts education, putting them at the service of students and their emancipation, and another one that develops theoretical framework and reflection on that action.
We are particularly interested in rerooting the technology to the needs of art students and subvert the apparatuses that are currently serving the instruction and supervision of those students.
The practical work we present is the result of an electronic platform in a class of K12 design students. One of the main purposes was the monitoring of PAP (career aptitude test) that all students of technical professionals have to do at the end of the course. It is above all a space that is built through a collaborative process with the students and where their experience is taken into account. As such, they participate and change the platform. Definitely it is a space with different guidelines concerning control and supervision .
Within the mentioned axes, classes and the platform open times and spaces of permanent opposition between instruction/emancipation, education/art, technology/culture, hierarchy/anarchy, art/language. Our action and reflection are inscribed within a theoretical framework constituted by the works of Rancière, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Agamben, Foucault and Walter Benjamin. We hypothesized education and ICT as apparatuses at the service of the implosion of the Real and as the configurators of the present Simulacrum. Moreover, we use research on art and education as a laboratory to break the Simulacrum; and breathe in the Open resulting from that interruption, and the dismantlement and profanation of the involved apparatuses.

Method

On one side, in this work, there is an operating method in the building of the platform that emerges from the depths of the Code and the inherent procedures to Interface Design. However, the participation of students and teachers with their critical positions opens a space for a methodology that emerges in the construction process, being the opposite of the previous approaches. We have, then, a first opposition between the methodologies of Interface Design - although with concerns framed in participatory design and User Centered Design (UCD), specifically in Human Centered Design - and the methodology that emerges in action often involved in nihilism regarding technology itself and departing from radically negative anthropological placements. It is from these positions that we fit a theoretical body that is supported on an aligned methodology, even with deviations, in the principles of Saussurean semiology taking in mind, for example, Barthes, Foucault and Baudrillard, but above all, based on the Agamben's perspective on language. So there is an analysis of the consequences of the instruction provided by the apparatuses in question, that uproots the human from his vital dwelling in language. "[T]he history of human beings is perhaps nothing other than the hand-to-hand confrontation with the apparatuses they have produced - above all with language.” (Agamben, 2005). Between myth and technology, we have the experience that opposes to the method and, in that space, we analyze the rites and games set for education and ICT. Research in Art and Education, is a territory that also leads to an adjacent experience that was destroyed by the scientific method. So, we open the possibility of releasing sleepy or unexplored grammars, in order to root technology in the students’ languages.

Expected Outcomes

In this project we built an electronic platform from the principles mentioned above. The experience of this construction opened directions for the rerooting of technology according to the needs of an art student; the student was a participant of this construction with power and space for his/her emancipation and to change its position within the current educational hierarchy. From this project it also emerged a methodology that underpins from a theoretical body critical of the instituted power and technological fascination in this society and, in particular, in education.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books, 2007. ———. The Coming Community. Minneapolis, Minn., [etc.]: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. ———. What Is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009. ———. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1993. Barthes, Roland, and Annette Lavers. Mythologies, 1972. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation (The Body in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism). Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage Publication, 1993. Benjamin, Walter. One-way street and other writings. London; New York: Penguin, 2009. Foucault, Michel. ‘What is an Author?’. In Writing, no. 73, 299-314. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Verso, London, 2009. ———. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994. Raskin, Jef. The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Author Information

Tiago Assis (presenting / submitting)

i2ADS Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade

Núcleo de Arte e Intermedia

Porto

Tiago Pinho (presenting)

FBAUP

NEA

Vila Nova de Gaia

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