Media Education's New Code
2007; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Art Education and Development
ResumoAs a video instructor a few summers ago, I met several art professors who had enrolled in the workshop for a weeklong swig of digital instruction in hopes of steadying themselves against the latest wave of technical demands. The concerns articulated by this diverse group included how to lead content-rich, genuinely creative, and human-centered courses in the era of Adobe dominance. Despite a university's dedicated effort to keep pace on the upgrade treadmill, it seems that higher technology has not miraculously improved the content of student work or the quality of learning. The challenges of electronic arts education, however, are beginning to be answered through concrete actions and creative teaching. My search for positive models of instruction led me to a particular motion graphics course taught by Dan Boyarski, professor and head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh. Boyarski and colleagues Ben Fry and Golan Levin are all practicing artists and designers working across the spectrum of electronic time-based media practice. Each of their philosophies addresses questions of contemporary media education in innovative and practical ways--by reaching across the boundaries of academic disciplines, writing code around the limitations of prepackaged imaging packages, and preserving an emphasis on human-centered work within electronic arts education. An accomplished information designer himself, Boyarski won the Design Management Institute's Muriel Cooper Award in 1999 for outstanding achievement in advancing design technology and communication in the digital environment. He speaks internationally about his work and methods, as well as his concept of voice. In one of his talks, Designing with Time, Boyarski uses student work from his own courses to convey the complex issues related to time design in new media education. Boyarski was a founding member of CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), where engineers, designers, computer scientists, and social scientists collaborate in the study of the effects of computer and interaction design on people and society. An artist, engineer, and composer, Levin is also assistant professor of electronic time-based art at CMU. He completed an undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and worked as a research scientist and interaction designer before returning to MIT to study with John Maeda in the Aesthetics and Computation Group. Writing his own code from scratch, Levin creates interactive audiovisual artworks that respond to users' gestures in real time. Levin's works have been exhibited and performed internationally, and, among other honors, have earned him the Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica for the interactive Audiovisual Environment Suite (2000), and Scribble (2000), the associated performance. Fry is the current Nierenberg Chair of Design at CMU. Fry completed his PhD in MIT's Media Laboratory in 2004 where--along with Casey Reas, another former student of Maeda's--he created Processing, an open-source program language and environment and a tool for artists to use to program computers. Fry's visual investigations of complex dynamic information have been shown in national and international venues. A long-term project, Genomic Cartography (2002-7) combines science with design disciplines to develop creative visualizations of information relevant to the human genome. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] JOANNA HEATWOLE: College digital arts programs are sometimes criticized for teaching to software in the same sense that United States schoolteachers are said to feel pressured to teach to the test. At one East Coast university, students can actually take a minor called Maya, named after the three-dimensional animation program. DAN BOYARSKI: You should design a class around learning outcomes and goals, and then the appropriate comes into play. …
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