Andrea Lunsford gave a keynote address several years ago --entitled The Role of Rhetoric and (New Media) Writing in 21st Century Universities-- at the NC Symposium on Teaching. Her presentation is worth revisiting for its ongoing relevance to teachers of writing at the college/university level.
Her presentation (the audio of which is linked to below) ocused on: 1) re-framing the notion of 'writing' to include involvement with mediums other than text, 2) shifting the focus of such writing towards "making things happen in the world", and 3) maintaining a commonsensical and also arch case for the value of rhetoric-based education.
These are all premises that underpin the DMA course, and bolster my ongoing development as a teacher. It's the second item --making things happen in the world-- that I think resonates with the social, conversational writing that I have advocated for some time. In writing conversationally there is a real audience, real perspectives are transformed, and this in turn affects how we live and learn in the real world.
Lunsford is a Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford. More importantly in my scheme of things, she practices everything she professes. As such, her keynote was insightful and inspiring, and full of good examples. As might be expected, her presentation was also exquisitely balanced in its rhetorical appeal and delivery.
She first became one of my heroes when she clearly stated her support for the idea that student writing --including texting and everything else-- is indeed WRITING, and should for this very reason be accorded the highest respect. Many were the times that I shook my head as teachers, who were my audience in workshops I used to give re: how to use the internet, would say that they could not get students to write because they (the students) were too busy texting, messaging, and emailing one another.
I knew these teachers meant that texting and so forth were not the same as writing essays, but still it gave me pause, I mean real pause, because they did not seem to hear themselves actually saying that students had no time or motivation for writing because they were writing too much. And, gulp, sometimes, all to often really, these types of comments were coming from teachers of writing. So it was a joy to discover that Andrea, a bona fide English teacher at a top-drawer university, was insisting that when people are writing they are writing. Let us now be thankful for small things I guess :)
I've had several students write, unprompted, in blogs and so forth that they, too, are delighted to know that Andrea, an adult and English teacher, actually thinks they are bringing important skills and dispositions to the act of writing. Note, though, Lunsford is absolutely certain students need to be able to leverage and extend their abilities in a variety of ways while they are in college, for example by learning how to develop and communicate a stepwise, complex argument (premises, propositions, support, conclusion, etc.) and to do so within a recognizable arc that includes a beginning, middle, and end.
In my estimation Lunsford is side-by-side with Mimi Ito on these kinds of issues --not only in POV, but also in doing the research to back up the POV. Like Ito, Lunsford has for years been involved in careful longitudinal study of youth involvement with media --in Lunsford's case the focus is on student writing, in class and outside of school, and on the myriad ways in which the notion of writing is expanding right before our very eyes (or, with a nod to Derrida, expanding in the eyes of our pupils). It's time to stop bashing student culture, students' new ways of learning, and their writing. It's time to open our own eyes and expand our ways of seeing. Lunsford states this clearly and unequivocally. It is time to understand and build on what's going on, time to get on with it. YES!
So, it was a wonderful experience of convergence, confirmation, and new learning for me to hear Ms. Lunsford talk about the aims, grammars, forms, and nitty-gritty practices of education, and the need to align such matters with the magnificent give and take of the NOW. This is the kind of alignment I am seeking all the time in the DMA course.
So, here's my conclusion. I think everybody should listen to Andrea Lunsford, plain and simple, just like that. Accordingly, I recorded her talk and it can be heard via the embedded media player below. Enjoy!
For quite a while I've aspired to Eliel Saarinen's maxim: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." With several larger-than-course projects now organizing my teaching practice, I think I am finally realizing this aspiration. I'm deeply involved in program-design in my area. I'm internationalizing my practice. I'm writing two articles, one on the topic of creative planning and another on the topic of education in Facebook. So I am finally working within a next larger context. I have turned a corner.
I have also for some time thought about a point made by Stuart Brand in the documentary film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future. His point is that if a person gets to a juncture in their professional life where they look around and notice that no one is doing exactly what they are doing, then they are doing pretty well! With regard to my own pursuit of an integrated approach to liberal arts, fine arts, and everyday life, I think I am reaching such a point of convergence. I am beginning to see my own reflection in Brand's mirror of professional progress.
A portable, billboard-style blackboard I made --mobile tech!
Appropriately enough for a media studies professor, a key last step in this convergence was the rediscovery of a particular medium --chalkboard drawing of all things. I have my eldest son Will to thank for this. He was at the library and spotted a book called The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and checked it out and brought it home for me.This book makes a wonderful and solid case for the idea that in order to solve problems one needs to be able to splay things out on a single layer (use chalkboard, whiteboards, lay materials out on a floor or table, etc.) in order to 'get the big picture,' and then distill this into a fairly simple picture.
The aha moment for me in this was the realization I had been frustrated with computers on many, many occasions due to their being what I have now begun to refer to as a 'layer' rather than 'splayer' medium. Rather than seeing one's thoughts on a single surface --as in chalkboard drawing-- computers constantly drive us to work in layers. Books do the same thing for that matter. Both are layer technologies. We literally never see the big picture, and this actually impedes certain modes of thought --in particular, brainstorming and similar modes. For other things computers are of course preferable and wonderful. I'm just more aware now of the need to combine and recombine layer and splayer mediums. My most-prized item in the media studio I teach in is now my portable blackboard, which I made by pulling an unused blackboard out of a closet and making a billboard-style rolling support framework for it by repurposing a wooden desk I had previously made and was not using, and adding clamp lights. I'm tellin' ya, it's a love.
Okay, so the last point in my convergence story is that whilst working at my new chalkboard I noticed that chalk on board (a liberal arts tradition) closely resembled charcoal on paper (a fine arts tradition). So now I am reactivating the fine arts side of my professional practice via charcoal drawings, and also exploring various hybrid forms involving combinations of chalkboard-drawing+charcoal-drawing+new-media. William Kentridge is among those who pioneered such things, so one of my first experiments was to do a Kentridge-style time-lapse movie of a drawing in-the-making. See video to the left.
This all adds up to being a fun and interesting time for me. I'm also (finally) creating a personal website, so I am doing what is for me the arduous work of mining through various and sundry stashes of various and sundry artifacts --fine arts related, liberal arts related, teaching related, etc.-- and putting them in some semblance of order. More on this in a different post.
Grading is right up there with courses in terms of being a major structural stumbling block that nonetheless could be a building block in formal higher education. Wise heads seem to agree that 'assessment' is an important part of learning, but that it need not imply or employ 'grading' in the usual letter-grade sense.
One of the contemporary champions of good, well-designed, and/or authentic assessment is Alfie Kohn. In case you are not familiar with his work, here is a link to a piece he wrote called From Degrading to De-Grading. In it, he advocates for authentic assessment and does a good job of defining various forms it can take --none of which involve letter-grades, as you might imagine. A logical conundrum that Kohn in some ways does not forthrightly address is the piece of writing linked to above is this: any system that can be set up can also be gamed. So, in setting up a new system to replace the letter-grade system, we would unavoidably be creating a new game. Most folks stop right there and throw up their hands at the futility of doing anything re: grading, so we get stasis (all talk, no action, conversation without composition, etc.). So in order to move the process forward I think we could try broadening the context a bit by thinking deeper about games: 1) Assuming there is no intrinsic motivation present for a student to learn certain subjects, a game framework provides an agreeable form of extrinsic motivation for them to meet this externally-imposed requirement. The serious-games community in educational thinking is on this path: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game
Assessment or evaluation in this category simply means getting a good score as defined by the rules of the game. The games don't have to be computer-based. For example mastery-based learning typically makes a game of sorts out of sequenced units of readings-and-quizzes, the aim of which is to get a perfect score and thereby attain mastery re: a body of content. No letter grade needed for game-based or mastery-based learning. You either get a good score in the game or not, or in mastery-based learning you either get enough of the questions right or not (sort of like the written part of a driving test).
2) Students at my institution, UNCSA, are arguably already playing an earnest-game (more serious than a serious game, even). The game is in the genre of "Bet-against-the-house!" and it is called "Get a day-job in the Fine Arts." The extent to which we can tie content and assignments to their success in this game is the extent to which we win by helping them win. For example in my bailiwick a requirement to create a professional e-portfolio gets no push-back because this is perceived as helping them win the larger game they are playing. If I use fine-arts exemplars of creative thinking, rather than liberal-arts exemplars, I get better traction with students at UNCSA because it helps them win the game they are playing. So I focus on fine artist exemplars like Laura Karpman, and only mention liberal arts exemplars like Walter Ong. So in this context we already know that students are playing a high-stakes game that they are invested in. Motivation here is ample and intrinsic. Hence no letter grading is really needed. Assigned work keyed to their earnest-game simply needs to pass muster, and if it does not then presumably the student is automatically worried. I think this is pretty much the leverage art-area professors work with, whether they have to give letter grades or not. Their fine arts teachers are in the process of engraving the students' tickets into the arena of day jobs in the fine arts. 3) It's a big undertaking to introduce additional, larger types of games like "Having a life of the Mind" or "Living a well-rounded Life." These games are earnest as well, and are typically played by students who --unlike any of the students at UNCSA-- are engaged in serious study within the liberal arts. Introducing games, in addition to producing stressful overload and overhead costs, involves teaching students the rules of the new game(s), promoting them as more important than the one they came here to play and win, etc.
We can tell them that getting good at having a life of the mind will help them win their earnest-game in the short-run (by making them more interesting, articulate, and better at the 'soft' aspects of their art or craft), and also help them in the long run (by helping them maintain satisfaction and edge professionally, and by broadening their fall-back net in case they either don't win the earnest game they are playing, or win it but find it hollow). But these matters are at least one step removed from their intrinsic motivation, and the content is not typically presented in game or mastery-fashion. So there is little to no intrinsic motivation or time to take the earnest game of the liberal arts seriously, nor is there really much extrinsic motivation. Beyond being intellectually skilled (able to read and write in a variety of media including but not limited to text) and moderately informed of the intellectual content of their art areas, there is no need really for the BFA to include the liberal arts. So, not surprisingly, those of us operating within this motivational chasm have tended to rely on the artifice of fear-based letter-grading --even though neither students nor teachers really need or benefit from it. It is a pox on both our houses!
So... If we want to remove letter grades we would need to remove the need for them in the currently predominant category 3 system. I think the best strategy to remove the need is a variant of a category 2 type of deal, in which we seek to do things such as:
Treat each student as a person, much like they are treated in their art areas (in this way we can embed a big chunk of the Humanities in our actions rather than relying so much on our our curriculum and teaching).
We would/could also align our assessment practices with what is done in arts areas, which would be perceived as helping them win their game.
Devote more of our effort to framing what the liberal arts needs of film students are, compared to music students and so forth. Beyond a core set of courses designed specifically to educate students about all of the arts, I'd argue that there is a need for a more defined sense of curriculum and electives based on arts area. I sense for example that that film students need to read a body of literature in the liberal arts that is quite different from what a design student needs to read, and right now it seems very hit or miss to me whether or not students get the appropriate advanced liberal arts work. And, as noted above, if the advanced electives were more closely tied to their earnest-game they might be much more easily convinced that doing the work well could be a game-changer for them. If we got this type of thing established, then the need for letter grades might be reduced or at least rendered as insignificant as I imagine it is in the arts areas.
Here is an article on collaborative grading (meaning that instructors collaborate to assess how each student is doing). This is an extremely overdue measure for us to take on the liberal arts side of our institutional house. We need to be assessing students, not isolated work done in isolated courses. The article is by Veronical Boix-Mansilla and is called Productive Shifts: Faculty Growth through Collaborative Assessment of Student Interdisciplinary Work.
In closing, a great example of the harmfulness of grades is IMO in Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament in which he imagines a scenario in which music was taught like math --with high-stakes grading, laborious memorization, and so forth. Obviously not many people end up wanting to do math, and grant funds flow to anyone basically who thinks they have a clue as to how to teach math better. This is a particularly relevant cautionary tale at our school because we get the benefits of how the arts are typically taught: in other words the students who come to our school are with few exceptions excited about their work. If math were taught as an art, there may be more students who would care passionately about it and hence pursue it as a major involvement. Another angle or artifact of this is that arts-oriented public schools seem to fare pretty well. Reynolds High School in in our local area (it's in Winston-Salem NC), which gets way way more applicants for an arts-infused high school than they can admit. Finally, a quick note of humor about a type of grading practice that one of my colleagues assures me is ancient. See video below for a 29-second introduction to this timeless form of grading!
Part of my compositional energy goes towards articulating or framing problems. This is as it should be, but I am also dead set against whining. My motto as a composer of education is "don't whine, prototype!" I am a big fan of doing the needed research then designing and running a pilot or experiment, or constructing a real-world prototype. I love conversation, but nothing is more enervating that endless talk coupled with no action. Conversation needs composition! It needs a doing component.
So in this post I am relaying a piece of research on the history of American higher education that I think will be useful in the construction of a prototype for my current work context --a context which finds me working on the liberal arts side of a BFA degree program.
The title of the article the excerpt below comes from is only somewhat more forgiving than my subject line. It is: "Brief History of American Academic Credit System: A Recipe for incoherence in Student Learning." I was busy trying to track the craziness of the BFA --marketing slogans which IMO might include "Just add the liberal arts and stir!" or "Just bolt it on to the fine arts!"-- when I happened upon this article. It sheds a different kind of light on the origins of the current plight of higher education in the U.S. as it struggles to find a new form.
For me the value of history as a problem-framing and problem-solving lens is that it conveys the clear message that structures we inherit --and which can thereby strike us as determined or natural-- were created in prior conditions by prior individuals just like us. For me this argues for the need of every generation to re-form the basic structures themselves, rather than conforming new situations and opportunities to old forms.
So this post is one of several that focus on the structural problems that seem to beset the BFA degree and trip-up efforts to reform curricula and so forth. My general pitch is that the problems run deeper than curricula, having to do more with structural, organizational features like 'courses' --and this article fits in this matrix quite well because it talks explicitly about one chapter in the history of courses.
BTW the emphasis in the article on the benefits of using a comprehensive examination (of some sort) rather than credit-hours to determine whether or not a student is awarded a degree dovetails with what is typically done in MFA degree programs in the visual arts: each student has a culminating thesis show. So, why would something like this not make
sense in the BFA degree program as well? i.e., in our case, a presentation and oral defense of a portfolio of best works?
Students would still sign up for and take classes but, as is the case in MFA programs, faculty would give mostly A's because grades and courses don't matter really. And this mirrors how students are graded in the fine arts areas of the BFA. What matters is the progress students are making in their work, as reflected in artifacts, and in presentations and defensea of these at whatever intervals make sense.
In my MFA program we had "reviews" at the end of each term which were basically mini-shows we mounted in our studios, a bit like what D&P does but more frequent and less formal. Our faculty members would basically studio-hop, and each individual's committee members would had more to say and discuss.
Moving to this type of model would mean we would work with STUDENTS, not with courses and credit hours. We could use the existing advising system to divvy up the students each of us would work with. In effect we'd all serve on the committees of x number of students. I'm tellin' ya the stresses we feel are related to some fundamental structural problems in the way we keep trying to do things. The wackiness includes but is actually bigger than just grading.
Anyway here's the excerpt from the article I found:
At the end of the 1800’s and the beginning of 1900’s, the Carnegie unit became the basis
for granting high school diplomas and credit hours for the baccalaureate. In the late 1800’s,
Harvard’s Eliot pushed for comprehensive examinations similar to those he observed at
Oxford, the Carnegie Unit as a measure of higher school attainment, and elective
courses in the Harvard curriculum. He succeeded in the last two but not the first.
The elective system obviously works against common comprehensive
examinations but for a credit hour system. Kreplin summarized their mutual
reinforcement as follows:
The emergence of the credit-hour system apparently coincided with Charles W. Eliot’s
introduction of electives at Harvard College in 1869. Following Harvard’s lead, the notion
of electives rapidly spread both within disciplines and among institutions, and this
expansion was paralleled by the introduction of quantitative course measurements.
Dietrich Gerhard identified two phases in the spread of the system of course
credits that were stimulated by the introduction the elective system following
1870.
From now on in the growth of the credit system two phases can be distinguished: an
earlier one in the which the colleges start to measure the teaching of subject matter in
hour units, and a later one, in which the credit system is further perfected and becomes
consolidated: the value of each course both in high school and in college is now listed in
units of credits, and it is definitely stated how many units of credit are required for
receiving the respective degrees. The first phase can be dated as of the 1870’s and the
1880’s; the second as of the next two decades, around the turn of the century.
The college credit hour is based on the same rationale as the high school
Carnegie Unit. And the Carnegie Foundation, according to Gerhard, explicitly
stated:
… in the counting of the fundamental criterion was the amount of time spent on a subject,
not the results attained; if, for instance, a year’s work in plane geometry would be
covered by the way of two weekly hours, the subject should be counted as only 2/5 of a
unit.
As the credit hour became the dominant measure of student attainment, four
years became the standard requirement for the baccalaureate. Jones and Ortner
identified six influences that led to the four year standard; one of which was:
There was little trust put in final examinations, and external examinations had no tradition
in the U.S. Hence, the time spent on the college campus became a convenient
measure.
John H. Finley made a parody of the Carnegie Unit as follows:
45 minutes make an hour
5 hours make a week
36 hours make a unit
15 units make a matriculant
5 matriculant hours (for one year) make a point of count
60 points or counts make a degree
In his thorough review of the quantification of education by time units, Gerhard
observed:
It is the rigid system of “points” and “units," organized in a businesslike way, cutting
education into pieces which, from now on, though well fitting into the structure of a
modern depersonalized business civilization, became the headache of every true
educator ….11 (Emphasis added.)
The credit system makes the university a banking system. Gerhard sites
Norman Foerster in his 1937 book, The American State University, as likening
the pursuit of the American baccalaureate to buying it on the installment plan.
Once a credit was earned, it was as safe as anything in the world. It would be deposited
and indelibly recorded in the registrar’s saving bank, while the substance of the course
could be, if one wished, happily forgotten.
As the curtain falls on the DMA summer-edition --and after having reviewed the results of a survey about various aspects of the course-- I now feel ready to gather my final thoughts and lessons-learned.
For starters I want to thank the participants in this course. What a cool and centered group you have been to work with! Kudos to y'all on taking on this challenge, and on meeting it with such positive attitudes, intentions, camaraderie, creative intellect, and results. For me it's been a phenomenally interesting and insight-generating conversational and compositional exchange we've had over the past five weeks. I have learned a lot from you and have appreciated your efforts and insights all along the line. I have also appreciated your willingness to venture outside of your comfort zones to try new things and put yourself out there.
Meanwhile, the survey data confirmed a constant feeling I had during the course of the term that the basic composition as we were enacting it this summer (including its online delivery format) was working. It was indeed enabling a balanced learning ecology to emerge in the interactions of student-to-student, student-to-content, and student-to-instructor. That's the ticket. Hooray!
More specifically --remember the lament I began my summer composing challenge with?
"I confess. In many instances in my teaching I fall prey to being an
absolute idiot, a complete knucklehead. I spend time worrying about
keeping things in order, or thinking about grading, or thinking about
[insert some other form of approved and officially-recommended craziness
here], and I let this overwhelm the far more important need to think
about, provide a space for, and tend to the quality of a conversation. I
absolutely believe that all learning takes place in conversation, and
that conversation is beautifully and wonderfully creative. To me,
conversation is like a cognitive-emotional form of dance. So why would I
allow myself to find ways to ignore or limit conversation in my
teaching?" (this was from my first post on this blog, way back on May 22)
So the heart of the experiment or intervention we enacted this summer was the use of Facebook-based conversation as a key element in the course composition. This didn't come out of nowhere, because I knew from past experiences that online conversation can be rich and mighty in its potential to knit life and learning together (where they belong :) and I have for some time felt strongly that all learning takes place in conversation (with the self, with nature, with each other, and so forth). But I had no idea how well Facebook would work in this regard, nor whether students would take to the idea. Given my predilection to build on what learners already know, the choice made sense, but it was a gamble in terms of academic course design. I was delighted with the way the platform worked, and students took to it well, so we won this particular gamble!
From what I could gather from a cursory web search, most instructors who use online conversation in their teaching use Blackboard or other learning-management system discussion forum. But for me this wouldn't have captured the blending of learning and life that I think is pretty much a sign of the times. From what Mimi Ito and other stellar research-performers are finding, young folks are involved in learning all the time, so why isolate formal education from the 'natural' education students are already engaged in? Why not just add to the already rich mix of information and perspective sharing going on?
So, these above things were tried, and in the summer-edition it seems clear that Facebook-based conversation served us well. As part of this, I thought the group provision created an appropriate sense of membership and enclosure. And I also thought it was great that we got profile pix and windows on each others lives as people as part and parcel of using Facebook for discussion (and the pix sometimes changed, which added yet another interesting layer). To me these kinds of things all matter in an online environment. If we had we used Blackboard for discussion my sense is that we would have gotten too much separation, and too little integration and synergy with our everyday lives. And, the conversation was consistently good --just plain good, and also good in the sense of being full of learning. So, with your help I got some major deliverance from my above lament!
I now want to share a few final observations about the content of the course and what I learned. Not to rehash things, but to create markers that I can return to in the fall and beyond, and also to tell you a thing or two about things I think I know, which I may not have already told you :)
Thing #1
I think the general description of a contemporary context defined in many ways by boundary-blending, as initially outlined by Marshall McLuhan, is pretty accurate and worth contemplating further. I posted this description initially in the Facebook group conversation, and have re-posted it in this blog as a different, separate post so as not to clutter this post or make it overly long.
Thing #2
In conditions of boundary-blending --characterized by constant shiftings, continuous cycles or loops of dissolution and
novel coalescence-- the concept of emergent-order (and/or self-organization), derived from chaos-theory and complexity-theory, provides a very
useful structuring principle. As mirrored in conversational interaction, the new order is dynamic rather than static --and balances the dissolution of familiar
boundaries with the generation of new (yet familiar) boundaries. There are non-random elements, in other words, but these are dynamic. They are verbs rather than nouns! This is what is truly new about the current age, and it is something that we haven't quite gotten our hearts and minds around just yet: the "fixed points" in contemporary life are in fact dynamic, not fixed. This may be important for us new-media composers to ponder.
BTW the presenter in the video below talks about how the
interaction among just a few simple elements can result in immense and beautiful complexity --again in much the same way that just a few people in conversation can generate all kinds of insight and knowledge.
Along these lines it needs to be said that the conversational dynamic in this course generated several mentions of dynamic forms of order, and unerringly led to these two main/concluding "Things." :)
Something else I learned --and still related to the concepts of boundary-blending and emergent-order-- goes like this...
Seurat's masterpiece The Side Show
French impressionism and pointillism can be seen as harbingers or prescient
forms of the current dynamism. Much as the paint becomes particulate or granular in impressionism and pointillism, everything
in the new-media era becomes particulate and pixelated --including
things like creativity and intellect. These things flow and coalesce, and ultimately know no boundaries until they form them on their own. Again much
as what one sees in an impressionist or pointillist painting is
constantly shifting as well because it is constantly being assembled,
disassembled, and reassembled in the viewers' eyea.
A detail from The Side Show
This 'particulate matter' approach resonates with the principled approach we've taken to new-media composing. For example Manovich's principles become can be explicitly coalesced in particular ways, as can the exemplars we have considered. These things can be seen as particles.
Working collaboratively can be seen in the same framework. For example the famous collaboration of Rauschenberg (artist) plus Billy Kluver (engineer) --or the more recent Laura Randall (scientist) and Hector Parra (music composer) collaboration-- arguably treat individuals as particles that flow and coalesce in marvelous ways.
Collaboration also provides a good example of how boundaries dissolve and also re-emerge. It's interesting to see things like an engineer or a scientist working alongside a visual artist or a music composer, and to see the boundaries between these domains dissolve. Yet new ones emerge. For example it's pretty easy to see that Billy Kluver was not your average engineer with a pocket protector with several different mechanical pencils stuck into it. He was apparently a creative dude who happened to do engineering for his day job. So in the meltdown of boundaries between science and art for example, what may emerge is a new focus on finding "the creatives" in whatever discipline or field they happen to be toiling in, and work with them. Instead of looking in a particular 'bin' as it were, this is more like a cross-sectional approach that moves between and amongst many 'bins' if that makes sense. So one set of categories (artist, scientist, engineer, music composer) dissolves to some extent, and another forms up or comes into being that consists of categories like creativity, intellect, spirit, or science as rooted human dispositions and/or ways of knowing or WOKs (more on this below).
This sort of describes the ethos or organizing principle of Black Mountain College --a joint that has been mentioned quite a few times over the past five weeks-- and is also the ethos that informs the ongoing existence of places like the U.C. Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies, a college-with-a-college that admits folks to major in art, biology, chemistry and biochemistry, literature, mathematics, music composition, and physics. Note that social networks across disciplinary boundaries exist throughout history, but it's likely the structural or disposition-based commonalities --creatives flowing and coalescing together for example-- would be a persistent feature.
Thing #3
(Okay, yeah, now I'm taking serious liberties). In a boundary-blended context, with emergent-orderings serving as constant yet dynamic "fixed points" if you will, artists may need to proactively invent new genres, not just new artworks. If boundary-blending applies to new-media composing as well as all other types, this means that as soon as new boundaries are set up, as soon as new genres come into being, these too will have their boundaries messed with. This is closely aligned with one of the key points in French deconstructionism; namely, it is relentless. The deconstructive process (which sounds negative but it's not) is informed by the dissolution, or progressive granulation, of old, tired categories. This process is relentless and also constant/incessant, like change itself, but --and folks often miss this-- the dynamic of deconstruction does not preclude order, it just refuses to prescribe order. It welcomes ongoing flow-and-coalesce movements, and it welcomes emergent order.
Thing #4
I learned that my very own ways-of-knowing or WOK framework may be
an emergent form in this regard. In the dissolution of the boundaries between 'disciplines' or even
'professions' a new set of boundaries, a new categorical scheme, may be emerging that features the aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and scientific dispositions or ways-of-knowing. One of my sons asked me
about the WOK thing, saying (in the typically direct fashion of a
fifteen year old), "Dad, did you just sort of make that one up on your own?"
And I had to say, "Why, yes, I did..." --but then I also told him that I gave a guest
presentation in the spring semester in a philosophy of art course taught
by Rick Miller, and afterwards he said my view of art as as a
way-of-knowing was somewhat in line with the view of G.W. Hegel --so maybe I get to borrow some respectability from this association. So anyway, I didn't talk about the WOK deal much this summer term, but I think it's a fairly sturdy framework. The basic idea is that each WOK represents a unique way in which humans pose questions to, or probe, reality. And each WOK delivers unique responses or answers not covered by the others. And each has its own signature methods. Again what I've learned this summer is that the WOK framework may be emerging in the wake of the collapse of categorical systems based on disciplines, professions, and so forth.
A few quick remainders and reminders follow...
I learned that dividing new-media composers into folks who expand on new-media concepts, processes, or technologies makes everything easier to understand. I hadn't really thought about this prior to talking about it with y'all this summer. For me it helps explain how composers like JR can seem so cutting-edge and 21st century while not being involved much with the technological aspects of new-media.
I learned from all of you that all I can really need to do as a teacher is try to inspire via putting content and tasks before you that may be worthwhile for you to consider or engage creatively and intellectually with. I of course need to try to provide a coherent structure, and a decent learning environment or ecology that includes good materials, but the materials need to be compelling enough to drive the process. I can't reach everyone, but everyone needs to be able to reach the content, and everyone needs to find at least some it worthwhile when they do.
I've learned include the role inspiration plays in decisions about having something to say.
Its role is really one of replacement. It is not so much that young
composers need to have something to say, it is rather that they are
looking for inspiration --things that move them. These can come from
internal passions (a passionate interest in dance, filmmaking, or what
have you --which is kind of a given at UNCSA) or from external sources (stories that are inspiring on a
basic human level, for example, stories about overcoming obstacles, and
so forth). In this same regard I noted a connection here between the importance of inspiration and the rise of inspiring-content venues including TED, and the PBS program area called "Off Book." I am also reminded of a distinction I developed over many years of visiting museums of art, that some art inspired me to want to make art myself, and other art sort of awed me as a passive recipient. I always preferred the former (when I look at Rauschenberg's work for example, it makes me want to make art, not look at it).
In this regard, part of the role of the liberal arts in the BFA degree/training
of young artists is simply that of introducing additional sources or types of inspiration. In DMA I hope one of those additional sources is the idea of being one's own new-media composer, and I hope another is that of being able to see composing in broad as well as specific terms. I also hope at least some of the exemplars of new-media composing shared in the class might be inspiring. An autobiographical+biographical approach continues to make sense to me in the age of social networking that is, again, keyed to inspiration and rooted in principles that include a fundamental dynamism.
A couple of practical matters. I learned that a "question of the week" format works well if the question is good. So I need to be ever on the lookout for good or better ways to frame questions.
I also learned that it might be good to have a daily, regularly scheduled 'helpline' time in the fall (and along these same lines I think I will also have an official face-to-face 'helpday' in the f2f media lab classroom in the fall since everyone will be on campus).
So, all in all, I think my summer composition, my own challenge, yielded some progress towards reshaping DMA in positive ways. I initially reframed the DMA course as a composition course, and I am seriously contemplating submitting a name change from DMA to NMC (New-media Composing). I then talked with colleagues and students about this framing. Following that I gathered clues for how to do this from my many travels in curricular and pedagogical design, and teaching experience that includes a kind of incurable love of education as a creative medium to compose in. Then I created the course itself --composing it of Facebook-based communications, Google Sites + Google Docs content delivery, blog-based portfolio assessment, conversation-based pedagogy, mixed-reality ecological design, and so forth. And I am now reflecting on my efforts. So I've "walked my talk" in these regards. I've used the learning cycle myself. And it worked!
I also mirrored what I was teaching by attempting to balance concepts (having something to say), processes (saying it creatively and intelligently), and technologies (selecting materials, and orienting assignments, towards variety in media-type).
Given that I treat course design as a compositional arena, it's inevitable that I do some things in a very process-oriented, improvisational way. My hope is that some of what students learn is felt --on the level of David Boehm's "implicate order" of things. I would like to think that people get more of a feel for new-media composing through my use of creativity in designing the course itself, and I would imagine these affective aspects may, assuming they occur, be just as important as things like teaching and learning the basic principles of new-media as articulated by Manovich, McLuhan, and others.
Along these lines, though, I also attempted to integrate and 'walk the talk' of the new-media principles that were introduced. I attempted to design-in these principles, such that the course has elements of numerical representation, modularity, variability, automation, transcoding, dynamism, simultaneity, multiplicity, ubiquity, and reflexivity.
The reflexivity principle came around full circle in fact, in the above way, and may be something I'll continue to think about. It may be the case that other instructors, in other content areas, could benefit from using content-related principles derived from their subject matter as design principles in much that same way that I've ended up doing (again some of this has been the result of a creative process, not the result of pre-planning, although there was some of that as well).
What have I learned? That I am hooked on process :) I will maybe want to move back in the direction of doing a couple of discreet bodies of work in the upcoming year, maybe one in digital imagery, and another in sumi-e painting, and maybe another that combines these two.
I also learned that I very much like the idea of replacing 'studying' with 'composing'. This too seems to me a warranted streamlining of the BFA degree that would make the liberal arts component much more meaningful and relevant to what students are learning in their arts areas.
And, finally, I stumbled on a new metaphor:
"Starting with a metaphorical flat sheet of paper --thinking and talking about composing in general-- in week one, we then proceeded in a principled, project-based way to fold the sheet into a specific shape --new-media composing-- in weeks two and three.
By the end of the third week we had identified and explored concepts, processes, principles, genres, tools, and exemplars of new-media composing. The sheet of paper had taken on a definite shape.
In week four we then unfolded one side of one new-media principle --namely the hyper-individual side of new-media dynamism-- by framing and enacting self-directed projects.
In week five we unfolded the other side of the new-media dynamism principle --its hyper-social side-- by composing something of a collaborative nature with a particular social purpose."
And I stumbled on one other metaphor I like a lot as well -- 'composing en plein air.'
Well, it's time to fold up the tents now, I guess. It's been great camping, conversing, and composing with all of you, way up here online, en plein air. And this would be my last totally uninformed inclusion of a German phrase --"Auf wiedersehen" y'all-- which I gather is one way to say "until we meet again." Meanwhile I'll be assembling, posting, and sharing my cut of an "Intro to DMA" movie tomorrow, fully expecting I will like your versions much better! So I guess this is just my opening farewell.
In some ways the new-media era is characterized by a merging of
categories that, at least in Western cultures, had previously been kept
separate. Mechanical and organic, art and science, mathematicians and
artists, natural and man-made, mind and body, and so on --all of these
previously understood and firmly in place boundaries are now in question
and flux. There is a lot of categorical mixing, boundary-blending, and
remixing going on! Why?
Marshall McLuhan traces this
general boundary-blending to the properties of electricity, noting that
electricity more or less operates as a solvent: whenever it encounters a
boundary, electricity in one way or another dissolves it. For example,
It is obviously old news to modern-humans, but the introduction of
electric light in its day dissolved the boundary between night and day!
So McLuhan noted early-on that new-media is essentially a distribution
system for the 'solvent' that is electricity. He saw this prior to the
advent of the internet, BTW. His was the era of television, and he saw
for example how it dissolved the boundary between the family and the
society at large. He also saw and commented on the role television
played in dissolving the boundary between war and everyday citizenship
by 'bringing the war in Vietnam into American living rooms.'
Of
course there are push-back sequels to this story --for example in the
more recent creation of cable networks and internet search engines that
reassert various types of viewer-bias boundaries. Or in the recent
examples of 'media managed' wars (i.e., very few images or voices of
Iraqi or Afghan civilians get seen or heard on mainstream TV media). Or
war (of a different sort) being waged against new-media or indie
journalists.
So, in our own era, we see selective
types of push-back, and yet we also distribute the solvent of
electricity not only via television, but also in our phones, tablets,
laptops, etc. --and we then further distribute it ourselves by calling,
texting, skyping, messaging, posting, etc. In this overall, almost
overwhelming inter-connectivity, boundaries such as the ones noted at
the top of this message --man-made vs. natural, and so forth-- at very
least end up being rearranged and renegotiated and remixed.
Okay
so if the above, or something like it, represents a fairly accurate
description of how we now live, artists in part work within genres like
generative-art in order to help us make sense (including aesthetic
sense) of the actual state of contemporary life. But again, as I've said
on other occasions, this particular type of new-media composing again
only represents one of its three major strands: the first strand
selectively builds on the ideas and concepts of the present (JR et al),
the second builds mainly on the process-potentials of the present
(Kensington et al), and the third builds more on the tools/technologies
of the present (which is where folks Like Pearson and Reas arguably fit
in). But, in keeping with the above narrative, these categories, too,
tend to dissolve! :)
So here's the deal. I like a lot of things about the summer-edition of DMA. To be honest, my review is almost entirely positive. I feel better about the summer-edition than any of the other versions I've tried over my six years working on it. So mainly what I write below are issues related to translating the summer goods into an extended-edition in the fall!
In this post I first describe my main plan or 'rough translation' as it currently stands. Then I describe more specific and detailed things I'm planning on doing in the areas of communications, workflow, and assessment.
A rough translation
The very basic or rough translation program I am currently running involves composing a three-module extended-edition of the summer-edition of NMC for the regular term. The five-week summer-edition materials and activities would basically be ported into the extended-edition as the first of the three modules (see diagram and descriptions below).
Proposed three-module structure for the fall term
Each of the three modules would span five weeks of the term, which leaves room for a one-week orientation at the beginning of the term and a one-week wrap-up at the end. So, the basic regular-term structure would be comprised of three five-week modules and two one-week bookends.
What we did in the first three weeks of the summer-edition --getting our hearts and minds around 'composing' in general (week one), and then identifying and exploring concepts, processes, principles, genres, tools, and exemplars of new-media composing in particular (weeks two and three)-- would form the core of the first five-week module of the extended-edition.
What we did in weeks four and five of the summer-edition --exploring both sides of the dynamism principle of new media, the hyper-individual and the hyper-social-- would become part of the second, self-focused module in the extended-edition. This module would naturally include projects that are practical and discipline-oriented (i.e., self-promotional websites, video auditions, and so forth), autobiographically-oriented (i.e., personal Digital Stories), and personal creativity-oriented (i.e., self-selected projects involving creative experimentation/learning).
The third module in the extended-edition would be society-and-service-oriented rather than individual-and-career oriented. There are several projects currently going on at UNCSA that warrant, and would benefit from, the involvement of skilled new-media composers. There is for example the 21st Century Student project, the ART\Islam project, the Music Academy of the American South project, and the Student Health project.
The basic idea of the third module is that empowered students, and the world, can benefit from power-sharing. Students would have an opportunity to look outwards, and apply the skills and dispositions learned in the first two modules to relevant larger-than-self projects. Students might, within any of the above options for involvement, compose documentaries, engage in citizen-journalist reportage, do ethnographic research, create marketing materials, build research databanks, and so forth.
In terms of staffing, I plan to subdivide the overall enrollment of one hundred twenty students into twelve sections of ten students each, and run it as a fully-online offering (in essence, creating twelve sections of what we did this summer). Sounds daunting, right? It certainly does to me! But it's an interesting compositional problem so I'm down for it.
For starters I can make the content and assignments available on a central course website. Then, I can also create a Facebook "page" to serve as a kind of central communications hub. Blackboard can continue to serve as a distribution point for copyright-protected content and streaming-media content. Then, as the final piece, I can create one Facebook "group" for each discussion section. This is all pretty do-able stuff.
Communications-related details
The extended-edition will inevitably --due to the multiple sections and single instructor-- need a slightly different communications dynamic than existed in the summer edition. In the summer I am able have a relatively high level of direct conversational involvement in the Facebook group discussion, but it will not be possible for me to read and respond to twelve different discussions in the same way or at the same level that I am able to do when there is only one section. So here's my plan in this area:
I will need to recruit one person from each ten-person section to take on Facebook discussion group leader status in exchange for points/credit.
With that provision, I can work out a system for myself whereby I read and take part in the group discussions on a rotating basis --for example I might check-in on four discussions each week, or something like that.
I can also set and maintain a routine for sending out email and notices to everyone --sort of like all-points-bulletins. In a distributed online environment this can serve as an important convergent element, it can provide needed non-random structure, and it can also provide me with an avenue to establish and maintain 'instructor presence' in the learning environment.
Routine yet relevant communications can also establish and maintain the presence of the course itself in the consciousnesses of students. This is a key point: part of the overall goal is to have the course exist in the thoughts and conversations of students.
Here's the main/whammy point. Online courses ultimately exist in the hearts and minds of students, not in wires, computers, and websites. We're talking neural design, or designing with quantum materials here! So I will want to give significant attention to finding out what works best in terms of the channel(s) for communication and conversation.
The media-studio in Workplace West III will also be open --during times when students would have had to attend the DMA class F2F-- so conversation and tutoring on a Newtonian scale will also be an option for students who have enrolled in the course.
Okay, so weekly emails to kick off new weeks of work/play, preview-the-week texts included on the course website, end-of-week reflections posted on this blog, answering questions posted to the Facebook "page" --coupled with rotating participation in the Facebook groups-- may be adequate. Yet the discussion leaders will be crucial, so I will likely need to meet with that group of twelve once per week to check-in and make suggestions. And F2F interaction will be part of the menu of options. I think this should make for a well balanced and effective communications context.
Workflow-related details
Unless I hear otherwise from the summer students in their feedback on the summer term, I will assume that the learning-cycle structure is a keeper, and I will continue to use it in the fall.
Each week will start with talking in Facebook about an essential --and, initially anyway, pre-framed question-- and the work-week will proceed through the remaining phases on a five-day cycle.
Gathering will take place each week on Tuesday, in order to allow a full three-day window in which students can schedule the time they need to create the required composition(s) for the week, and reflect on the process.
In part for the reason mentioned above --namely the need for a regular kind of beat or rhythm as a structuring principle-- I want to stay with a five-day work-week, so that each week will feature one trip through the learning-cycle, with projects due at midnight on Friday. I want to stay away from assigning weekend work!
Some editing and tightening-up of assignments on my part will be needed to optimize this. For example in the first five-week module I will probably stipulate that for each week there will be a required "project brief" blog post, such as the one we did in the summer for week four, organized in subheadings that match learning-cycle phases. (This is the type of procedural detail by the way that can will need to be taught in the orientation week of the course.)
Also for my part, I will revise and edit the assignments to make sure they mirror the learning-cycle phases. For example, "In this week's talking phase, discuss the question for the week in your Facebook group, and copy-and-paste your contribution --along with any other messages composed by others that you found interesting-- under the talking subheading in your blog post for the week. This is due on Monday no later than midnight." Etc.
Asssessment-related details
Grading has the potential to make fools of us all. What matters of course is the person's learning, and feedback is part of the learning process in formal education settings. But the needed feedback can be implemented in a variety of ways, and by various people in the learning environment.
One of the aspects of the summer-term that I thought worked well was the explicit allowance of time for students to look at and comment on each other's work. This is a meaningful form of assessment. It involves comparing another's persons choices and work-products to one's own. On my part this means I will have to incorporate this into the assigned work for the week --i.e., it might be the "reading" for the week to check-in on and read groups members' blogs.
I will enlist the help of discussion-section leaders to let me know how the Facebook group discussions are going. This can occur in the weekly meetings mentioned above.
I will basically be the person responsible for critiquing the blog post compositions, and also critiquing the entire blog as a composition unto itself. This is manageable.
We are at this very moment perched on the DMA version of the continental divide.
In the first three weeks (or part one) of the course we became acquainted with concepts, processes, and tools that are part of the new-media composer's toolbox or palette. In effect we set the new-media composition stage, primed the new-media composition canvas, and did some good composing as well.
A John Singer Sargent painting of Claude Monet painting en plein air
In the next two weeks (or part two) of the course we will be plying our new-media knowledge and skills to the framing and implementation of self-directed projects; in other words we will be taking up our composer's palettes and heading out into the world to paint (so to speak) en plein air. (For us this "open air" will consist of self-selected and self-directed projects.)
Plein air has additional relevance as well, in that the new-media remix ethos --which we've been exploring in projects, readings, viewings, and exemplars this week-- involves using life itself as the raw materials for composing. Contemporary life of course includes a veritable ocean of representations (billboards, magazines, the internet, TV, on and on and on) so to prevent contemporary composers from using these materials as they work directly from life would arguably be comparable to preventing plein air painters in 1880's from setting up their easels outside and painting directly from life --unless they had permission from whoever owned the views!
A 'mobile tech' box-easel
So IMO it's interesting to ponder and compare the acoustic echo of current new-media 'street art' or 'social interventionist art' or 'remix art' (i.e., the work JR, Banksy, Gregg Gillis, and others) to the 'plein air painting' that became all the rage in France in the 1870's.
Interestingly enough, the plein air movement in France was given a boost by the new 'mobile technologies' of paint tubes and the box easel! If we then play this echo of mobile-tech out a bit it gets pretty interesting. The advent of portable new-media (fancy fones and tablets in combination with wifi or cellnet access) may be what ultimately changes the ratio of time spent making art indoors versus time spent making art outdoors, in the open or en plein air. New-media mobile technology may the equivalent of the box-easel. The new-media ethos and tools have perhaps already unleashed a new generation of plein air artists, again including folks like JR.
BTW this type of change is by and large what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said "The Medium is the Message." The external properties of mediums end up being more important than their internal ones. Mobile technologies (whether box-easels or mobile computing devices) change the ratios of daily and artistic life --meaning they change basic things like time spent indoors vs. outdoors-- and this ends up being much more important than the programs that run on the fancy fones and tablets. Does that make sense? If it does then you are well on your way to understanding Marshall McLuhan, new-media, and the role of media in general in human life.
A quick review
Week one: a focus on composing, what it is in general, variations in artistic/creative composing, uniqueness and principles of new-media composing. [Need to add multiplicity to the list of principles!]
Week two: a focus on ourselves as composers, influences and so forth, what we are composed of.
Week three: a zoom-in on new-media composing, review principles, add method to principles to form a stochastic filter of new-media composing, then see how the stochastic filter is self-similarly reflected and holistically embodied in genres like remix, and note issues that arise when new-media structures intersect or collide with existing laws and norms.
A Frank Gehry building addition
In some ways the intersection and collision of the old and the new noted here has been given the name 'postmodern' --and in architecture this intersection or collision is made palpable and visible in the work of Frank Gehry. In many of his architectural works, one type of form literally seems to collide and ultimately mesh with another (see image on right).
A quick preview
Week four: a zoom-in on the self as composer, self as medium, via self-directed projects (practical projects are a possibility here) or digital-storytelling (an established and very intriguing genre of telling a story of one's own or assisting someone else in telling their story).
Week five: a zoom-in on further exploration of the creative-side of new-media composing, framing and working/playing on compositions that focus on the world as stage or canvas.
So we've staged a dialogue or conversation in a way between ourselves and composing (with an emphasis on its new-media variant) and in the final two weeks of the term it shifts back to an emphasis on ourselves as composers --we get the last word or the last speech (or rant, or diatribe, or ramble :)
A closing ramble
To some extent I've composed a piece of 'wetware' (aka a conceptual framework) as my part in the summer edition of DMA. The wetware program has a method (the learning cycle), a set of principles (derived from Manovich, McLuhan, and me --and others of course), a set of exemplars (Laura Karpman, Matthew Herbert, et al), and a signature genre (remix, broadly considered). The role of genres --since genre is this week's focus I'll add this-- is IMO to create workable, usable, microcosmic forms of larger 'cosmic' forms like zeitgeists. So in my wetware program, remix (if considered broadly enough) captures the new-media zeitgeist very well.
So at this point in the term I am in effect doing a 'wetware distribution'. I am more or less saying 'here is the program, here is the conceptual framework, go test it, try to break it, see if it works!' In some ways I guess that makes you guys, all of us really, beta testers :)
A Frank Gehry dwelling on the Venice Beach CA boardwalk
This is a point worth dwelling and elaborating on since this is a media studies course. Wetware --once it reaches a certain level of organization-- can potentially be developed into software. If I were a software designer, I would have the beginnings of a piece of software, or an app, or perhaps even a game called "New-Media Composer" or something like that. That's part of the wonder of software: it materializes concepts and dematerializes material things. There is now something --arguably a dominant-something-- in-between the strictly-material and strictly-immaterial. It's become a liminal world perhaps.
As we move into and through the next two weeks I will continue to share readings and things like that with you, and we will continue to have conversation and sharing on Facebook, but your blog posts will all be related to framing, talking, gathering, creating, and reflecting in relation to your own projects.
In regard to additional themes and topics I want to introduce or elaborate on, here are a few examples:
We gave somewhat short shrift to the topic of processes so I'll share some materials I have, and a perspective I've developed, on the creative process in particular and its relationship to processes found in other ways-of-knowing or WOKs. This will amount to a short exploration of theory of creativity.
There is a history of worries about new-media --worries about it ruining our ability to concentrate, destroying our social life, making us into addicts, etc. These tend to come in waves, and their history is only mildly interesting IMO, but it probably needs to be introduced just so you will know a bit of it.
Implicit in what we do in DMA is the idea that it makes sense to optimize the internet by adding creative-intellectual-work/play to your internet rounds, and editing out stuff that wastes time or distracts from substantive work/play. My main advice is to exercise common sense, and if you can't do that, at very least don't blame the medium! Knitting can be a dangerous distraction, as can TV and a whole host of other things. You can probably tell from my tone that I have been round and round with various worries about new media since 1993, and IMO they all pretty much resolve to human factors that can be managed with balance and minimal resolve. Walter Ong reminds us that the ancient Greeks worried in the same way about the introduction of writing. This kind of history lesson helps us keep it real I think!
I'm very interested in where education will end up in the wake of its great intersection or collision with new-media, so I'll share some of the resources I have on this topic with you (for those who are interested in these types of things). As you know the DMA summer edition is a kind of educational-composing prototype for the revised class that I plan to roll forward into the regular term (with adjustments as needed for the different circumstances). I will continue to ask for and rely on your perceptions to help me shape and roll the prototype forward.
I will also do a short introduction to programming since this is one of the places creativity is moving. Likely programming will get easier and easier to do as more graphical models are developed, but it will likely always be a good thing to know how the code works behind the graphic interfaces. I learned basic good 'ole HTML coding in 1993 and while lots of tools have come on board to do the coding for us, I have never stopped using plain old code for some things. So we'll do a quick introduction to HTML and also a quick intro to a current programming language called Processing.
Finally there are IMO interesting parallels to be speculated on between and among: 1) our immersion in externalized electrical circuitry via regular use of innumerable electronic devices, coupled with immeasurable time spent with electronically-mediated representations, 2) our brain synapses, and 3) quantum phenomena. For example the brain could come to be understood as a sensory organ --honed for sensing the quantum realm. We tend to frame 'thinking' as opposed to 'sensing'. But what if thinking turns out to be a form of sensing? So we can share some speculative ideas and meanderings and gleanings on this topic if a good occasion arises and if some of you are interested.
None of the above five topics are in the wheelhouse of the DMA course, but they are worth noting, and worthy of further exploration IMO.
This post is designed to provide a summary perspective on the first two weeks of work/play in DMA. As I see it we are doing very well in terms of functioning as a healthy learning community or ecology, and we're meeting the goals of the course. We've identified some common features of composition in general, some unique features in various forms of artistic composition, and a set of specific characteristics of new-media composition. Meanwhile we have also identified various approaches or avenues to understanding and becoming better new-media composers, and we've brought this understanding of multiple approaches back full-circle to a sense of common or shared humanity. Not bad for two weeks.
Common features of composition in general
In our initial work/play we sought to explore and understand composition as an inherent capacity of human beings, linked to the basic physiology of perception and the basic psychology of representation. This gave us an early window on the simplicity of composition (the triangle of composition, representation, and perception is relatively tidy) and also its complexity (none of the three constituent elements of the triangle are the least bit simple!).
From there we began to notice a common basic structure within composition, even when it is considered in varied forms including paintings, sculptures, dances, poems, films, musical pieces, and so forth. All of these forms have their unique features, yet all can also be seen as involving three simple building blocks: 1) having something to say, 2) saying it creatively and intelligently, and 3) saying it with technical facility. Again the elements form a simple, stable triangle, but none of the elements that compose the triangle are the least bit simple.
So arguably we gathered that composition as an activity is simple yet complex --or deceptively simple perhaps-- or (if you like fancy words) we discovered that it has a kind of stochastic structure, meaning a structure that combines nonrandom elements (the triangles) and random elements (the immense variation and interactive potential of the constituent elements of the triangles) into a higher-order unity. In some ways the nonrandom elements act to filter the random elements, and for this reason the overall structure is sometimes referred to as a stochastic filter.
A particularly joyful lawn mower
Unique features of artistic composition
The above framework provides us with a basis for understanding why composing an artwork is similar to, yet different from, composing a mowed lawn for example (even though the chap depicted in the image on the right is cutting quite an aesthetic dash in addition to cutting his lawn :)
Lawn mowing clearly has an artistic/aesthetic aspect and a stochastic form, but neither the non-random elements of the genre of lawn mowing, nor its random elements, have nearly as much complexity as those involved in composing artworks. Conceptualizing what a mowed lawn should look like, deciding on a mowing process, then choosing a tool (mower rather than scissors, for example :) is much simpler than conceptualizing an artwork, deciding on and enacting a process, and selecting and enacting a technical repertoire to materialize a message. I think it's safe to say such things without offending the lawn mowers among us.
So, in artistic composing, the ideas or themes explored are often very complex (perhaps involving ideas and/or inspired intuitions, conscious as well as unconscious or semi-conscious impulses, etc.), the process is inherently complex because it involves at least two and possibly four processes at once (creative and intellectual processes are surely intertwined and involved in artistic composing, with spiritual and scientific processes also likely part of the mix), and the techniques are also often quite complex as well.
Yet it remains intriguing that the form of composing is self-similar across types and scales (as depicted in the image on the left). In one way or another, composers all seem to gather things up (tools, materials, and so forth), think and/or talk, use tools to assemble or reassemble materials, reflect, and share --though not always in that order! Lawns get mowed, artworks get created.
Unique features of new-media composition
We then moved on to explore in some detail the specific characteristics of new-media composition, since this is the proper subject (gotta love that kind of phrase :) of the DMA course. We first sought to explore and understand its uniqueness through unearthing or extracting the principles that inform it. We arrived at a reasonably good list: from Lev Manovich we gathered the principles of numerical representation, modularity, variability, automation, and transcoding. From Marshall McLuhan we gathered the principles of simultaneity, ubiquity, and fluidity (or boundary-blending). And I added the principles of reflexivity and hyper-individual+hyper-social.
The methodology we used to 'put the principles in motion' so to speak was a basic compositional algorithm, depicted on the right. So in effect the principles we identified re: new-media, plus the algorithm, add up to the non-random part of the stochastic filter.
This combination closely mirrors the framework outlined in one of my favorite books on composition, written by James Webb Young. It is an elegant book (an archetypically 'slim volume' consisting of a mere forty-five pages) called A Technique for Producing Ideas. In this book Young states:
"In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas. Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything."
So it would seem identifying principles and putting them in motion via an algorithmic method is a sound approach to take, especially if the aim is to produce compositions. It's noteworthy that Young's book is practical in nature, designed to help people produce ideas, not just understand what ideas are. So it's in line with what we are trying to do. Our aim is to become better composers, not just to study or learn about composition.
Multiple approaches to new-media composing
Yet it is certainly not the case that one specific stochastic filter will work for everyone. Here again, having such a filter may be universal, and being able to construct one DIY may be a requirement for would-be artistic composers, but the actual components of such filters may need to vary from person to person and from project to project. So. . .
As elegant as it is, the principles plus method approach to constructing a stochastic filter is not the only one to take, nor is it likely to be the single approach that will work for everyone and/or in all cases.
For some, an approach that features experimentation with genres may make the most immediate sense; not only figuring out how to fully utilize new-media-friendly forms like social-intervention, sound-collage, and remix, but also figuring out how to invent new-genres to suit one's own new-purposes or unique insights.
For others learning from exemplars may make the most sense. Exemplars might in other words form the nonrandom elements of a different type of stochastic filter. Composition is after all complex, as are human beings, so why not learn about new-media composing by learning about the subset of human beings called new-media composers?
Or, yet another approach that might work best for some, why not learn about new-media composition autobiographically rather than biographically, by learning about ourselves as composers who are alive in, and alive to, the new-media era?
A 'digital weave' composition I made some years ago
based on a scan of a watercolor painting
Or consider the triangle of ideas, processes, and techniques: in the fundamentals of compositional practice as played out in the new-media landscape, here too we find interesting variations. JR and Candy Chang both seem to riff on or emphasize the idea characteristics of the new-media era, its participatory, fundamentally and highly social character. Others like William Kentridge for example may riff more on the process aspects, the crazy-wonderful combinations and genres of 'new' and 'old' media that we can now compose for ourselves, and then compose within. Still others --Katerina Cizek comes to mind-- may tend to riff on the technical potentials of new-media.
A single, convergent aim before and after all?
So where does all of this leave us after two weeks? IMO all of the above approaches make good sense, so we are poised to mix and match them, combine and recombine them. Do you see how there is a conversation going on between the general and the specific, the random and nonrandom, the convergent and the divergent, one thing and another? The various approaches outlined above are possibly also "in conversation" with one another. And they perhaps form, at a somewhat larger scale, a self-similar set of nonrandom filtration elements for a somewhat larger stochastic filter.
So the hope is that everyone finds their own way into the conversation about new-media composing (with the help of friends and colleagues of course) and into enhanced awareness and mindfulness of its common structural characteristics and its specific variations, the commonality it has with various other forms of artistic composition, and the commonality as well it shares with the composing that everyone is doing everywhere and all the time physiologically and psychologically.
A level junction
The training for composers is IMO a matter of becoming a fully developed person, a person who is fully conversant with the self and the world, fully mindful and aware of structure and variations forming higher-order unities.
In this regard the self is perhaps the ultimate medium (I mean folks including Socrates have thought so, no?) and the world itself is possibly the ultimate school, canvas, and/or stage (and didn't Shakespeare say something like that?)
It is also notable and hopeful that this emphasis on the whole person as composer, and on the larger world, was part of the founding ideology of UNCSA. It was made very clear by Vittorio Giannini, one of the school's founders, that developing the capacity of full personhood was one of the the ultimate keys to becoming a complete artist of any stripe or type.
Let's let Buckminster Fuller (one of those lucky ducks who got to hang out down the road a piece from Winston-Salem, in the 1960's American renaissance, at Black Mountain College) have the last word on these matters. He came up with a formulation similar to Giannini's re: composing a life. His advice to young people was basically this: 'Wake up, look around at the world, figure out what needs to be done, and then do it.' On that note, what say you, shall we proceed?
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