Reconfiguring the Teleculture

Judith Doyle, BA, MA (ABT)

Associate Professor, Ontario College of Art and Design

March 2004

(Slide : title & sphere) Hello and thank you for inviting me from Toronto. I'll begin by introducing my professional practice, since it forms the basis for my contribution today.

(Slide : fox project & link) My recent art and postgraduate work focuses on urban foxes and new digital media. My archive's core is digital video I shot over several years of foxes in my parents' downtown Toronto backyard. I adapt this with other material into artworks, tapes and streaming media for different commissions and academic projects. Together, these will form 'foxscape', a navigatable DVD archive with cartographic features, addressing themes of boundary zones, embodiment, and questions of the animal and animal representation in digital media, especially the Internet. So my academic context includes environmental studies.

(Slide : worldpool series & link) I have taught Integrated Media at OCAD for sixteen years, but my work in the field of teleculture began earlier than that. In 1978, I was a founder of Worldpool with Willoughby Sharp in NYC, and others in Toronto. This shifting international network of artists experimented with telecommunications technologies for live-to-live collaboration and exchange, using the IP Sharp mailbox network, early fax machines, slo-scan video and other modem-based devices. Worldpool has features relevant to our conversation today, as do other alternative art practices - spaces, interventions in social space and discourse, mail art, performance. These form the art history for a new Hybrid Media course I team-teach at OCAD which is mandatory for second-year art stream students.

(Slide : Photo-Electric text) In the late 70s in Toronto, OCAD's Photo-Electric Arts Department worked with the McLuhan Institute in Toronto. Photo-Electric was an institutional subculture within OCAD, where decisions were made at democratic open monthly meetings, computing was often repurposed, borrowed or lower-end, with a strong electronics and robotics faculty, open source coding literacy, and interaction through performance-based strategies and connected narrowcast social events. I know you are familiar with this type of approach and may have facilitated it at your own schools and centers.

(Slide - ?) So you know this work preceded the constellation of technologies and administrative functions - what Braudel and Foucault call techniques - of IT that are now institutionalized in schools, and shape recent ideas of the 'new digital paradigm'. A 'pre-IT' prehistory of teleculture curriculum is relevant to our solutions-based conversation today because we can use it to craft paradigms and brainstorm ideas along different axes.

(Slide - IT text) How does an institution moves from a traditional curriculum to an integrated digital one? Experience tells us this doesn't occur in a homogenized way, but differently for different academic subcultures - design, art, new media - which each have different ethos, agendas, and priorities. So, if these institutional subcultures emerge at different rates, distinctively - the question is - what ingredients are necessary to foster this institutional ecology of difference in computing, against the homogenizing tendency of uniform IT services? As an umbrella structure, IT services is responsible for both academic and administrative computing functions, often at the expense of academic diversity.

(Slide - Ovals) Let's look at Worldpool. In this old experiment, networks aggregate from local nodes, through individual contacts. To update this for today, networks form from teacher-to-teacher or classroom to classroom contacts and experiments, collaboration, exchange and curation. This kind of network proliferation is horizontal and emergent, not top-down and planned.

(Slide - ovals with green ovals) And corporate support for it - whether one-time or ongoing - is prompted by the social functions and events of exchange. So, today I'll focus on this subcultural network model. I think it goes as given that universities can't compete with private providers at IT applications and systems based skills delivery, especially in the present context of budget cuts. We can't maintain our educational mandates while collaborating directly on curriculum with corporate partners. And research-science partnerships often subsume artists' contributions. Not to write these initiatives off, but let's look at alternative curricular models with something to contribute.

First : tool-based. Our first-year Integrated Media Foundation courses at OCAD are mandatory for the whole art stream. We skip like a stone, very superficially and quickly, over an inventory of tools - video, html, performance, film loops, electronics. It's exhilarating.

(Slide : Cul de Sac montage) By extension and contrast, our new 2^nd year Hybrid Media course eliminates tool-based assignments. For Hybrid Media, students work in groups. Each selects a site in social space which they research and document. They create an archive of documentation, an index, map and site intervention, and draw from this archive to adapt artworks for exhibition. At an advanced level, our projects will adapt artworks to applications in social space - for example, in the first semester you design and build something, in the second, you work on community-based applications for it.

We have shifted our paradigm away from some structuring agents toward others that may sound familiar to those of you practicing in the mid-late 70s. We are moving away from the vocabulary of technology to projects in lived social space. It's not that film and video courses are being dropped at OCAD; rather the new courses emphasize network movement over hardware utilization. This curriculum intensifies the inhabitation of local social space, ramping up student observation and engagement in its processes.

At first, students were resistant to projects that dropped individual assignments in favour of groups but in the end, almost all elected to continue to work in group formation. Artworks are presented at the very end, and are regarded more as adaptations than synthetic and critical outcomes.

In this alternative paradigm, teaching and learning aren't as fixed in institutional space; rather, teaching networks are fluid and moving - with teachers as mobile agents in social space. This could take the form of short-term exchange and inhabitation of each others' courses - more nomadic approaches, altering the sites of teaching/learning, and embodied teaching methodologies. I share Lev Manovich's philosophical view that the new digital paradigm is, first, not all that new, and second, has little to do with specific technologies.

(Slide - skill set text) What skill sets will graduates need outside their disciplines to be attractive to industry? I hope these are the same as are needed to intervene in our built world, and effect social change.

(Slide - code) Students will be literate in under-the-hood basics of code.

(Slide - database) They will be fluent at the creation, navigation and management of multimedia databases, sometimes extremely extensive ones, others small and sensitive.

(Slide - cartography) Our art students will be especially adept, creative, literate and subtle in the arts of cartography, indexing and the creation of navigational tools and transformations.

(Slide - interface) These always reference the body and embodiment, both in the touch surfaces of new (or rediscovered) interfaces.

(Slide - skeumorphs) They will be skilled in creating what Katherine Hayles calls "skeumorphs" - formerly functional elements such as dials and knobs that resurface and rewrite the body in familiar ways as design features on the Internet and screen-based projects.

(Slide - breakdown) Our students will address breakdown as a site of productivity, learning and experiment, rather than as a problem for someone else to fix.

(Slide - poster) Most importantly, our students will create applications - new social functions for art in lived social spaces. These are the learning outcomes I think are key.

The solutions I propose today involve implementing collaboration through a networked approach to hybrid media curriculum delivery and assessment. My ideas don't require a major retooling of tech support and infrastructure; they are ground-up initiatives that will work now. I propose a very specific project example, based in the Worldpool projects.

(Slide - site) I suggest we start with an ad-hoc group of instructors and courses who will share an assignment. Student groups would focus on specific sites, scaled to the body walking, in social space.

(Slide - maps and keywords) Maps and keywords provide focal points - for example temperature/warmth, mask/surveillance, language and screen-space, or more abstract notions such opacity, filters or portals. These frame projects across toolsets, as flexible agents for interdisciplinarity and collaboration across disciplines. Groups would not be limited to urban centers. I prefer to engage partners in remote areas of Canada, and in overseas countries, where the research would yield different experience, applications and use values. I suggest we use existing tools like e-mail to precipitate back-and-forth exchange between networked student groups, who focus tightly on sites in social space, building archives, maps, indices and navigational tools, expressing commonalities and differences between lived spaces. I think we should facilitate telecultural exchanges between groups, for live performance exchange and presentational collaboration. Endpoints could include travel, gatherings, exchange and curated exhibition in lived space, or shared interventions.

(Slide - elsewheres) I like this idea because it fosters connections between students in highly localized elsewheres, to collaborate and conceive of interventions and applications for their projects locally and globally. Corporate support would accrue for projects in provisional and localized ways, including loans of technology and travel subsidy. Partners might include micro-businesses and galleries, or larger firms such as Apple and Xerox who have supported these micro-initiatives in the past. The project parameters don't depend on technology: the issues of access and tools are embedded in research and creative problem solving.

Thank you.

Footnote : Artists engaged in teleculture before the institutionalization of IT learning, administration and distance delivery, before the Internet, before applications for design and compositing, before home computing, before the plethora of systems and interface devices - cell phones, e-mail, fax machines, camcorders, and on - that blur the boundaries of our bodies and institutions. This is the focus of the history I cite.