CULTURAL INTERFACE AS AN APPROACH TO NEW MEDIA ART EDUCATION
Open Access
- Author:
- Tillander, Michelle D.
- Graduate Program:
- Art Education
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 15, 2008
- Committee Members:
- Karen Treat Keifer Boyd, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Patricia Marie Amburgy, Committee Member
David Ebitz, Committee Member
Sarah K Rich, Committee Member
Carlos Rosas Jr., Committee Member - Keywords:
- qualitative research
narrative
actor-network theory
culture
new media
technology
art education
action research - Abstract:
- Issues of new media within art education practices are heightened by the pervasive and often invisible infusion of digital technologies and reliance on the Internet in everyday work and leisure spaces. This dissertation is a study of how a cultural interface approach to digital new media was introduced, implemented, and understood by teachers, with a range of technology backgrounds, and their students in the real-world environments of three public high-school art education classes. Participants in this study examined digital new media artworks (art and technology), culture (values, beliefs, and assumptions), and everyday experiences (lives of students and teachers) as they converge in digitally mediated environments. The cultural interface approach through the convergence of new media art, culture and lived experience with new technologies offers opportunities for conversations that explore how new media technologies reconfigure culture as well as how culture creates the environment for the creation of new technologies. As technological change continues to occur, this approach offers art education an opportunity to be informed and take action both critically and responsibly in exploring the reconfiguration of education in empowering ways. For this research, new media digital art is characterized as a cultural interface involving technology-experiences situated in communication processes, rather than in objects. This research [re]positioned new digital media art as a cultural interface. The term “cultural interface,” described by Lev Manovich (2001a) as “human-computer-cultural-interface” (p. 70), has implications for how art education can conceptualize technology. [Re]framing new media art in art education as a cultural interface facilitates an approach that considers digital media as a portal to cultural conversations. A cultural interface approach facilitates the generation and sharing of multiple perspectives, analyses, and interpretations among artists, teachers, and students as producers and consumers (prosumers) of digital experiences (e.g., software applications, Internet interactions, and social and immersive digital environments) that situate emotions, feelings, memory, and knowledge into our understanding. Ultimately, the examination of these experiences as artistic praxis where identity, community, and culture is affected by new media technologies offers insight into how learning is impacted. This research involves my engagement in an inquiry process with a diverse set of participants and sites. The research design explores emergent theory instead of predictive theory and engages in a critical, reflexive analysis involving a cultural perspective of technology. The analysis is conducted through an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) lens and examines the interfacing of expressions, experiences, and inscriptions of technology as empowering translations. Through this lens, translation takes on a specialized meaning where a relationship provokes entities into coexisting. The analysis is presented in a narrative fashion, describing the settings, characters, unfolding plots, and analysis of the data. The multilayered, metastory that I create consists of what I observed and interpreted from Actor-Network Theory and social theory art education perspectives and grounded in participants’ expressed perceptions. The narratives consist of orientations, complicating actions, evaluations, resolutions, and coda. This dissertation shows how a cultural interface approach can assist educators and students in understanding issues related to digital learning environments. The approach challenges cultural assumptions for understanding technology; engages critical thinking to expose complicated digital technology practices in culture; interrogates simultaneously natural, social, and discursive practices; and explores connections to the lived experiences of students. The field experience suggests that this approach promotes critical inquiry, self-directed acquisition, and multiple interpretations. The study reveals several examples of adaptations that art educators made and the subsequent strategies used to integrate new media art within their environments. This study shows how Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can be used to recognize stages (inscription, translation, and framing) in the process of introducing change in practical educational environments. Further, the study reveals patterns of social orchestration and resistances that surfaced—unique to each site—and provides key points in the translation process that shaped the learning/teaching strategies for each site.