Troubled Waters
Documenting Participatory Media Installations
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ralph Kenke
The non-permanent nature of participatory media installations provides challenges to the artist, researchers, curators and galleries to present an installation concept at an early stage and preserve such work after its uninstallation. The paper will briefly explain how an idea for a participatory media installation that aims to narrow the gap between the engagement in online and physical environments while catering for a documentation process at the same time. I will then continue to elaborate on the different types of participation observed during four exhibitions at Watt Space Gallery, Newcastle; Testing Grounds, Melbourne; Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney and National Portrait Gallery, Canberra in Australia and how they correlate to the various layers of documentation which, I call the scattered documentation process. My practice-based research methodology on the notion of telematic performance on shaping digital portraits is revealing the importance of participation to accumulate relevant content to document non-permanent installations. Through my speculative design method, I have designed creative process to spark and maintain a narrative that is the key result of my participatory media installation. I will discuss the challenges and opportunities the media installation ‘Selfie Factory’ (2017) by R. Kenke and E.Trefz created and, present the learning from its exhibitions and documentation approach. My research will reveal insight through observation, surveys, and interviews into how narratives surrounding the artifact have an impact on our Media Culture today.
Raising Robotic Natives?: Ethical Aspects of Learning with Robots in Kindergarten
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nils Frederik Tolksdorf, Scarlet Siebert
Today’s childhood is shaped by media even before entering school. However, the media socialization of children varies with respect to the socio-economic status of their parents (MPFS, 2015; DIVSI, 2015). In current research, the relation between media socialization and the socio-economic status is captured by the “digital divide” or “digital inequality”. While digital divide refers to the differences concerning the access to technologies, digital inequality refers to the varying media usage (Kutscher, 2014). Among children, inequality also exists in terms of educational opportunities, which is fundamentally shaped by children's language skills (Cabell et al., 2011). The development of children’s early language skills is crucial for nearly all subsequent learning and social participation. Therefore, the presented project aims at exploring the possibilities of language and media education through the use of social robots from two disciplines: We will apply social robots to scaffold children’s language learning by systematically consolidating language routines in an experimental setting (psycholinguistic perspective). While this method allows us to investigate the values of social robots for learning, it raises many open questions with respect to what are the legal, ethical and social implications regarding the use of social robots in long-term settings within a kindergarten (media pedagogical perspective). In our presentation, we will address the ethical aspects and social implications going hand in hand with new requirements towards teachers.
