Share, Share Widely

A Conference on New-Media Art Education

Topics:

Vocational training versus solid critical education

Edblogging, blogsperiments

Creation of meaningful connections between art, theory, technology, and history

Introduction:
“Share, Share Widely” is organized by the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) in collaboration with the Office of the Associate Provost for Instructional Technology and the New Media Lab, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Over the past ten years new-media art programs have been started at universities. Departments are shaped, many positions in this field open up and student interest is massive. In China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand enormous developments will take place in the next few years in “new media” art education. At the same time technologists, artists and educators acknowledge a crisis mode: from Germany to Canada, Finland, Ireland, Australia, Taiwan and Singapore to the United States and beyond. But so far, at least in the United States there has been surprisingly little public debate about education in new-media art.

How can new media theory be activated as a wake-up call for students leading to radical change? Which educational structure proves more effective: cross-disciplinary, theme-based research groups or media-based departments? Does the current new media art curriculum allow for play, failure, and experiment? How can we introduce free software into the new media classroom when businesses still hardly make use of open source or free software? How can we break out of the self-contained university lab? What are examples of meaningful connections between media production in the university and cultural institutions as well as technology businesses? How can we introduce politics into the new media lab?