Critical Digital Making in Art Education. Группа авторов
of these visual communities teaches students critical media literacy.
As suggested in the opening of this chapter, critical digital making has pedagogical implications inside and outside of educational settings and is therefore connected to discourses in critical media literacy. From a pedagogical viewpoint, many critical digital making projects discussed in this volume focus on the influential power of media and critical approaches to media education is at the core of critical media literacy (Giroux, 2011; Hammer, 2011; Kellner & Share, 2007). Critical media literacy is an educational framework to “understand, interpret, and criticize the meaning and messages of media culture” (Hammer, 2011, p. 358). Approaches in critical pedagogy and critical media literacy education have been advocated in art education as visual culture (Tavin, 2003) and calls for art-making as a critical strategy of resistance (Garoian, 1999). Thus, the term “critical media literacy art education” is used by some art educators to describe teaching students not only to understand and critique media messages but also to be able to use digital media for expression and activism (Chung & Kirby, 2009). Flavia Bastos ←9 | 10→and James Rees’ chapter “Who Is American Today? Promoting Critical Digital Citizenship with High School Students” discusses a classroom project using digital art-making as a critical pedagogical approach to teach civic engagement and creative citizenship. Asking students to reflect and examine social, political, and civic understandings and perceptions of citizenship from their own family history and experience, the creation of digital media engages students in creative activities that extend critical literacy into critical making. Bastos and Rees’ project in critical digital making develops skills beyond expression to foment participation in democratic communities as critical citizens.
Archiving can also be seen as an artistic media to be produced within a critical project (Wallin, 2017). In their work War on the Poor (2007–2011), artist collective Ultra-red created an audio archive asking participants “what is the sound of the war on the poor?” The archivization is as important, if not more than, the event (Derrida & Prenowitz, 1995). Archives provide important ways for the public to access and learn about community stories and responses that is both pedagogical and in the act of co-constructing communities. Cassie Lynn Smith’s chapter, “Critical Pedagogy in the Borderlands: Employing Digital Archives to Support a Local to Global Social Justice Curriculum,” discusses the use of public space and digital archive resources to create works that would prompt the discussion of social justice issues. In considering critical use of the digital archives, Smith offers an example of using the digital archive in critical practices that forms communities. She engages students in creative digital media production and arts performances prompted by digital archives to challenge institutionalized power structures.
Much of the collection, and especially the themes in co-construction and intervention, move making and learning outside of strictly school spaces into what Helguera (2011) calls “transpedagogy” to describe socially engaged art as unique educational processes through making, distinct from experiences of art education found in schools. He states, “in Transpedagogy the pedagogical process is the core of the artwork” (p. 78). Helguera hints at the blurring boundary of pedagogy and art objects provokes the thinking of pedagogy as art. However, these transdisciplinary practices crossing the boundary between art and technology can also be practices folding back into a rethinking of schools and institutions of learning as pedagogical acts challenging the rigidity of disciplines in education. Emiel Heijnen, Melissa Bremmer, Michiel Koelink, and Talita Groenendijk’s chapter “Arts Laboratories and Science Studios: How ArtsSciences Can Innovate Arts Education” discusses a transdisciplinary approach in bringing art, technology, and science together into school arts education having the potential to subvert existing school norms. Their transdisciplinary approach connects learning with real-life problems from a broad perspective that is socially engaging and conceptually challenging by probing the role of innovation to question the formation of our intellectual and learning communities.
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INTERVENTION: DISRUPTING THROUGH CRITICAL DIGITAL PRACTICE
For centuries art has been a vehicle to disrupt the status quo. Early twentieth-century art movements like Futurism, Constructivism, and Social Realism communicated visions of massive societal changes. Contemporary political movements involving gender equality, racial justice, environmentalism, and LGBTQIA+ rights have catalyzed artists whose work reflects, responds, or critiques society to use artistic practice as an intervention on power and social order. The ability to create artwork that spreads virally worldwide or engaging the broader public through digital devices and networks has created new avenues for artists in political and social arenas in the form of tactical media (Richardson, 2002). Screens, sensors, and communication networks allow digital media to be viewed in large common spaces as well as the private confines of one’s home. GPS and biometrics sensors allow for digital art experiences to be personal and site-specific. Public art in the digital age can be understood as collecting data from the public, the public’s participation in the artwork, or broadcasting artworks while still allowing for the work to be customized based on data-driven analytics. For this section of the book, the editors focus on the ability for artists and educators to demonstrate how they engage and disrupt traditional understandings of space and place through digital practices as forms of intervention.
To intervene is defined as coming in or between by way of hindrance or modification (Intervene, n.d.). Intervention as critical digital making manifests in blending physical and virtual spaces as a distinctive characteristic of our contemporary moment of ubiquitous connectivity coupled with social media. As recent hashtags #metoo and #timesup have ignited sharing stories of gender bias and sexual harassment to build avenues for coalition, social media platforms have become important spaces for these forms of activism (Langone, 2018). As sites for activism, digital responses by artists and communities allow for individuals to proclaim, share, and disrupt narratives in publicly visible ways to reshape discourse. Reshaping how digital practices intervene on everyday life can happen on many levels from the personal to the institutional. Artists Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s participatory project Learning to Love You More (2002–2009) was a crowdsourced artwork based on a series of assignment prompts posted on their project website. The 70 assignments focus mostly on simple opportunities for making, including photographing strangers holding hands, interviewing someone who experienced war, and crafting an encouraging banner. The banality of the prompts asks participants to question what they view as art, creating opportunities to make art more accessible, and exposing the personal. The project is an intervention on the artworld undermining high art paradigms through simple gestures of creation shared with the world online and bypassing the gatekeepers of high art. During ←11 | 12→the seven years of the project, over 8,000 people posted their assignments, taking advantage of the ease of sharing and social nature of digital media to spread and promote the work.
The simple gestures found on Learning to Love You More are amplified by the project website engaging critical digital making as a participatory and distributed action. Jennifer Motter’s chapter “Social Media as Sites for Feminist Activism: Facilitating Critical Digital Meaning-Making” discusses social media’s potential to serve as sites for critical digital meaning-making and feminist praxis, by challenging misogyny and patriarchal power structures through the use of simple artmaking techniques broadcasted through larger online communities.