|
Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
On April 24th, I'll be participating in a conference at the University of Buffalo on collaboration organized by Trebor Scholz and Geert Lovink called 'Free Cooperation.' There has been an interesting ongoing discussion at http://www.freecooperation.org.
One issue has been the use of the term 'collaboration' versus 'cooperation.' I wasn't aware of it, but the term 'collaboration' in many places in Europe brings to mind Nazi collaboration during WWII, so 'cooperation' is proposed as the preferred term.
A new thread has just started about models of leadership in collaboration, and Paolo Freire's work was mentioned by my colleague Marty Lucas in reference to his work with high school students of media.
There is a footnote in Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed in which he tells a tragic story of two teachers in a village in Latin America who were burned to death when a local religious leader told villagers that the teachers were promoting communism. Freire suspects that the leader may have seen a book with a bearded man on the cover in the school.
He tells this story in order to highlight the political power of teaching. There seems to be a kind of conflict within Freire's writing. On the one hand, in order to liberate the oppressed, a teacher or leader working with Freire's methods has to share power or allow the oppressed to take power for themselves. However, through this process, the teacher herself is gaining much more political power and influence than what he calls the 'banking' teacher, or the teacher who simply deposits rote 'knowledge'.
How could the idea that a programmed computerized guide could be 'present' in humanity even be entertained? In 'The Age of Spiritual Machines', Ray Kurzweill predicts that one of the greatest debates of the next century will be in the area of machine consciousness. When machines surpass the processing power of the human brain (as will happen in the near future), Kurzweill believes that there is a strong possibility that the issue of consciousness will be impossible to avoid. He predicts that the resolution of the debate will be total acceptance of machine consciousness, a 'bill of rights' for machines.
Optimistic, especially in the current state of society where the rights and even basic needs of humans are often denied.
Freire uses some terms that today are relevant to Interactive Media. He presents a way of investigating personal thematics (ways of understanding the world) that involves deciphering the living 'code.' Students observe moments of everyday life from every possible angle and circumstance in order to come to a greater understanding of the behavior of others and their own behavior. They observe 'decision making', 'heirarchy', and 'limits', all ideas central to the stucture of society, but also central to structured programming.
In terms of media, Freire speaks directly of the benefits of media in deciphering the living code. He encourages the use of slides and recorded sound in the learning situation as a catalyst for a dialogue.
Freire makes a distinction between traditional education, which he calls 'banking' education, and problem posing education.
He states:
"Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy) the intentionality of consiousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby denying people their ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality; thereby responding to the vocation of persons who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation."
Clearly this applies to any studio art class, not just those in new media, especially if the practice is accompanied by theory.
What is a question in my mind now, however, is whether Freire's ideas about becoming more human can actually be applied to the experience of interactive media. Even the simple process of searching the web, searching, asking questions, could serve to stinulate reflection, but it is an unguided experience. If a guide is built into the media software? Well, it becomes problematic. Can a non-human guide someone in the process of becoming human? This non-human was designed and programmed by a human. Some criticism of teachers claiming to be using Freire's technique states that they simply go through the motions of the dialoging process, that they aren't truly 'present' in th dialogue with the students. An computerized guide, then, even if it is programmed to learn about its students, could never be 'present' in humanity with its students... Or could it?
Well after incorporating a reading of Gonzalo Frasca's 'Videogames of the Oppressed' <http://www.ludology.org> into various courses, I finally got around to reading the origin of his work, 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed' by Paolo Freire, a seiminal work in education theory first published in 1970 and now reprinted in english by The Continuum International Publishing Group. Freire based his work on classroom experiences in Brazil where he created a kind of transformational dialogue between students and teacher that allowed students to move from a position of oppression to a position of humanity. His model is one of active participation based on theory, and I couldn't help thinking about the activity necessary in experiencing and creating interactive works in relation to Freire's ideas.
In classes until now, I think I had been watering down Frasca's ideas about 'Videogames of the Oppressed.' The basic idea conveyed to students was that the game presented a way for users to experience various scenarios and the implications of various actions in the real world. However, because the games that have so far been created offer only a finite number of options and consequences, they clearly only scratch the surface of Freire's and Frasca's ideas. Multi-player experiences like the Sims online offer the possibility of experiences much more like Freire intended.
However, the practice of creating the games, or thinking through the options and consequences in any piece of interactive media in the classroom, I believe in itself could provide the kind of unity between theory and practice and radical transformation Freire talked about. The interactive works could refer to relationships inside or outside the media, since our contemporary human experience is currently inter-twined with media experience. However, an awareness of the relationship of media experience to both oppression and freedom from oppression must be made clear to students.
Yesterday was the kick-off event for NY2050, <http://www.ny2050.org>, a project that involves the widest possible community in the New York area in a dialogue imagining the city 50 years in the future. I attended as a member of the steering committee, and was able to enjoy presentations by some incredible speakers including Mike Wallace and Ron Schiffman, co-authors of Gotham, and Cynthia Rosenzweig, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies where she is the leader of the Climate Impacts Group.
Dr. Wallace spoke of the vision of the future that existed in the mid-1940s as an introduction to the process of envisioning the future. New York City was the birthplace of many important ideas in the 2nd 1/2 of the 20th century. NY started the idea of civil rights, and also the idea of civic rights (that is, the rights of a citizen to have access to public libraries, education, and healthcare merely by virtue of citizenship). He also spoke about how sustainability was also addressed by NY in the 1940s when thousands of victory gardens covered the city. His presentation made it clear that the problems and successes of New York today depended on the actions of New Yorkers from the past.
Dr Rosenzweig spoke to a current global environmental crisis, the accelerated pace of global warming and its effects on the New York metropolitan region in the near future. She said that regardless of what is done today, New Yorkers of the future will have to deal with the effects of global warming, but that the severity of those effects could be determined by the actions we take today.
A member of the audience stood up and also talked about envisioning the future. Like Dr. Wallace, he talked about the need to examine the past, but he spoke about the very distant past, the past of the first humans living in the New York area, the Native Americans. He said that one very important idea in Native American culture is thinking about the future. He said that in this culture, one must think about the effect of every action one takes on five generations in the future. He said that if we all lived day to day thinking about how our actions affect the future, many of the problems we are facing would be able to be solved, most importantly the problem of energy and the problem of waste.
|