Visual Arts for a New World
Toward a Practice of Digital Handicraft
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Theresa Slater
This text speculates emergent themes in the practice of the digital-handicraft. We propose that digital-handicraft, a hybridized field of making, learning, and enactment, emerges from considering touch as a critical measure. This paper examines the way touch functions as critical feedback in order to explore the intersections between hand-making and digital labour. We put forward that the digital-handicraft expands the potential of interdisciplinary art, new pedagogical models, and alternative modes of organizing and resisting. This digital-handicraft practice considers labour as a key component of cultural production, immaterial or otherwise, and considers new implications of digital-handicraft labour in contemporary art, pedagogy, and activism. We define the digital-handicraft as an emergent discourse capable to expanding the pedagogical, artistic, and activist implication of the handmade and digitally crafted, and speculate as to the future of the practice. Within a digital-handicraft practice, pedagogy and activism become sites of mixed reality, where the online and real intermingle, facilitated by touch and craft. In theorizing a digital-handicraft practice, this text explores what each discipline might offer to the other, as a craft is rendered dematerialized, the online emerges via traditional handicrafts, and new methods of making emerge from hybridized practice.
I Want to Believe but I Don’t: The Promise of VR as a Creative Medium in a Trajectory of Numerous Failed 3D Imaging Technologies
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dave Kemp
Online reality technology holds great promise and there is considerable hype in terms of how it might be used in both the artistic and applied arenas; however, there are still major logistical issues to overcome related to cumbersome head-mounted interfaces, low-resolution displays, motion sickness, high costs, and whether or not we actually need or want it at all. Coming from a human factors, perceptual psychology, and STS perspective, this paper looks at the chronology of other 3D and stereo imaging technologies such as stereoscopes, anaglyphs, polarized glasses, shutter glasses, 3D Television, and CAVES to analyze why these technologies failed to take hold as more than mere novelty after initial periods of popularity and optimism. Through considering the factors that contributed to the “failure” of these past technologies, we can see that VR faces many of the same technological, cultural, financial and social issues, which would need to be resolved if VR is to survive as a creative medium and as a new form of expanded cinema. Going beyond the technical, this paper also addresses the need for VR to develop a new and unique cinematographic language. In this regard, a number of contemporary artists and filmmakers, who are experimenting with the medium in profound ways are presented in the hopes that they might very well be on the verge of doing for VR what Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) did for film, thus saving VR from becoming yet another example of a dead media.
Mapping the Future through Abstract Paintings
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jari Martikainen
My paper discusses the potential of arts-based teaching methods in motivating students to reflect on and map their plans for the future. A group of students majoring in visual arts, photography and audiovisual communication at an upper secondary college for culture studies in Finland took part in a course in which they made plans for the future after graduation. As an introduction to the course, students were asked to observe abstract paintings and choose a painting that best and least/worst expresses their future aspirations. The students were asked to reflect on their choices in writing. The written reflections formed the data of the research and were analysed using content analysis. The research shows that students found the assignment highly motivating and abstract paintings seemed to provide students with novel tools of exploring their – often vague – thoughts of the future. In addition, non-representative colours, lines, forms and compositions functioned as an invitation for students to fill them with their personal thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears related to future.
The City is Ours: Social Justice Challenges in a Community Participatory Arts Program
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aminata Cairo, Maarten Koole
This paper presents results from an ethnographic research project. Graduate students researched a participatory arts program that was originally designed to engage young women from an underserved community in a major European city. An NGO, supported by the local municipality designed a project where young teenage girls, through participating in art with artists would be encouraged to partake more in the art of public spaces and be empowered. Focusing on the girls’ experiences and the participatory process, interesting findings were revealed. The program adjusted its target and ended up engaging and heavily investing in girls who attended, but were in fact not from the neighborhood and of higher socio-economic status. These girls’ social and cultural capital were more in alignment with the organizers and the arts instructors. The original target girl population participated but minimally and were not invited to any of the public presentations of the project. Inspired by Bourdieu’s concept of cultural and social capital, the researchers want to introduce the concept of adaptation capital and explore the extent to which institutions fail or succeed to adapt to their target populations and what the larger consequences are to these actions. Finally, this team explores larger moral questions of responsibility and social justice, for those of us who want to use arts to engage and improve communities.
