Crossing Borders
Objective Time, Temporality, and Poietics: Our Contemporary Problem with Time
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paige Lunde
We need a new way to approach time in education. In order to understand the relationship that we have with the concept of time I will identify genealogical connections that structured conceptual time by questioning the way conceptual time was historically shaped alongside ideal notions of dualism and correctness that remain in educational pedagogy. I want to know how ancient expressions of temporality were lost as Western culture instituted a fixed framework for objective time. In this paper, I contend that a belief in time as a linear succession sends human awareness toward external objects because linearity is directed by the next object or minute. A mechanical system separates objects into successive states, which forces humanity to efficiently and logically predict outcomes. To disrupt a strict objective framework, I will study the ideas and artwork of John Cage. Essentially, his sound experiments will inform my investigation regarding temporality, which I will relate to philosophers including Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Mikhail Bakhtin, among others. Further, I will relate the former philosophers to Cage’s process that explores unpredictability and compare Cage’s process to Heidegger’s proposal that poietics or poiesis breaks our everyday reference to meaning.
University Art Gallery as Center for Interdisciplinary Creative Collaborations: Incubator Exhibits Where Art Makes Things Happen!
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carrie Weis
Over the last decade the Art Gallery Director at Ferris State University, a historically technical institution, noticed a steady decline in faculty and student participation. It was hard to acknowledge, but the role of the gallery as a place to view art was becoming increasingly irrelevant. The director decided to re-envision the gallery with the primary goal of becoming an educational resource, despite the challenge of interacting with many non-art majors. With some imagination, a lot of collaboration, and much excitement, the gallery’s first three incubator exhibits proved extremely successful. The collaborations met pedagogical needs, and engaged students in interdisciplinary, non-traditional interactions that ultimately resulted in gallery exhibitions. By facilitating the artistic and creative process thematically through faculty led assignments that linked numerous disciplines in various ways, students were provided a deeper challenge in conceptualization and creative problem solving. By having their work culminate in a gallery exhibition, the participating faculty and students are able to see the practical application of their collective assignments. The momentum continues to grow, annual visitors to the gallery have tripled. Yet, more importantly, the gallery has discovered a way to critically engage individuals with an educational platform that showcases art and creativity.
Humans Will Always Be Better Than Machines: Participatory and Performance Art in the Age of Assistive Technology
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dorothy R Santos
In Lauren McCarthy’s work Lauren, she installs customized software and hardware in a willing participant’s home. For 3 consecutive days, the artist performs as assistive technology in the same way someone would operate Alexa or Siri. Similar to voice activated technology, Lauren is able to provide, if not better, assistance to the participant. Through her observations, Lauren learns the nuances of her participant’s behavior and may preemptively execute an action. For instance, Lauren will turn down the lights down when she sees the participant preparing for bed. McCarthy’s work puts the onus on the participant to responsibly transmit commands to her in a way that may not occur with other assistive technology. In Lauren, McCarthy’s intentions and offerings are meant to exceed the overtly synthetic presence of Alexa or a Siri. Lauren doesn’t merely perform tasks, she is both benevolent and omnipresent. But do we want technology to be human-like? Is the purpose of artificial and assistive technology meant to ease the burden of daily life such as chores and creating shopping lists? Or, do we desire machines and devices as entities with the special skill to intuit our needs based on our actions and trebles to our voice?
To Hear a Shadow: Natural Frequencies and the Latent World
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dana Cooley
In the early twentieth century, many European avant-garde artists were taken with scientific and technological developments such as wireless radio, film, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the emergent field of quantum physics which atomized the universe. The ephemeral, the intangible; the world seemed governed by imperceptible, granular forces that played with time, location, and perception. In response, figures such as Lazslo Moholy Nagy and Walter Benjamin, saw the artist as an seismic instrument calibrated to pick up the faintest of reverberations of this newly redesigned universe, something of a canary in a coal mine. Since that time, many artists (Alvin Lucier, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nick Verstandhave, Christiana Kubisch, and Di Mainstone, for example) have taken the frequencies of the natural world as their material. As instruments to amplify the imperceptible (such as EEG devices which read brain activity) become increasingly available to artists, what can they telegraph to us? In this paper, I argue that art which routes the intangible physics of the world (from the geological to the biological) into our perceptual register helps us tune into those faint reverberations which flutter and fluctuate around and through us, reminding us of the interconnectedness of the world and what is at stake if we ignore this netted existence.
