It’s finally in print! The “Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance” has a section on Digital Puppets that will be of interest to many of you! It’s very $$$$$$$ so get a librarian to order a copy you can check out. The more books that sell now the more likely it will get printed in a more reasonable paperback version for the layperson.
http://www.routledgementalhealth.com/books/details/9780415705400/
Interesting essay on the climate of presentation– By Simon Sadler
“We are living through the era of the TED Talk, much like an earlier generation lived through the era of the World’s Fair, wondrous about our new world in the making,” writes Simon Sadler. “TEDification endows capitalism and globalization with a credible spiritual and ethical mission, just as the art of the Renaissance lent to the ruthless bankers of the Italian city states an enduring moral sheen.” Sadler explores the magical thinking and many contradictions of the TED juggernaut — and the implicit threats to design and educatio
Interesting article about selfie’s by Jerry Saltz– Interesting to consider how we craft identity.
For Ciara, Donnie and Oscar (and the other anthropormorphic forms interested).
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/27/big-mouth-heavy-doody.html
Fantastic! It’s excellent. Thank you, Molly!
Whaddya mean: “Fantastic! Excellent!” It’s tragic! Woeful! THEY BURNED THE PUPPETS DAMMIT!! Was there a Medici patron of NBC?
cackles
I knew there was sets of standards by which the people with money, land and power pick art they want in the public space. Work is chosen that communicates an agenda, an aesthetic or a certain version of history that those with money, power or land want showcased. In the last few decades the definitions of art has changed and this is affecting what is considered Public Art–Yeah! Today this came across my social media. UK organization, Situations, is proposing new rules for contemporary public art–some of them are great!
It seems that we have moved decisively beyond the idea of public art as a large steel sculpture in a public plaza. Nothing against Mark di Suvero, but the emphasis has shifted from what Critical Art Ensemble called the “sedentary model” of public art toward practices that involve participation, performance, and other process that unfold over time.
Mark Tribe
Rebecca & Christa have started to think about how we might use the .Re/cipes site, and “lists of rules” or “rulebooks” seem to fit right in with Algorithmic or Generative things like .Re/cipes
Check out this site from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA–where I used to teach). This project evolved out of the training MICA did for the faculty on Hybrid Learning. The faculty (me included) were very concerned about how you share the tactile knowledge of a visual arts program–this is one solution. SKILLSHARE
Over at the PBR MOOC, we’ve entered the final week! In a Vlog, Leslie Hill planted the seed for publishing some of the “findings” from this class. Great idea but I’d like to see it reflect this experience. Vanessa Blaylock said it best in a note to our team “The Internet is not a “thing” but a “place” and our experiences there are not “nouns” but “verbs.” LOVE THAT!
I imagine short form essays–the twitterification (in the best way) of academic writing. Writing that is concise, concrete and contemporary to reflect the place and actions of a MOOC.
What a wonderful idea Molly! It would be interesting to try to literally do it in Twitter – though I think that might be pretty hard, not sure.
But I wonder if a space like .Re/act which sort of encourages 1 or 2 paragraph interactions, would work? (for any tech dweebs, .Re/act is the “Houston” child theme of the WordPress “P2” theme)
Or maybe do it in 4:53 videos? Or 4:33? (haha, Leslie went 20 seconds long!) Or embrace mobile? Video apps like the 15 seconds of Tout, the 30 seconds of Viddy or the 36 seconds of Keek…
Leslie’s video:
kk, let’s try a couple more… (adapting from Kevin Kelly)
Creativity is a tendency, not an entity; a process, not an artifact.
Molly,
I’m still adopting to the ‘less is more’ style of communicating using as you put it Twitterfication.
My resistance is that is results is going straight to the conclusion, with little room for analysis. This has been problematic throughout history. Think of the U.S.’s 2nd Amendment. It means two entirely different things to different people, Example: for the NRA-types, it says absolutely no regulation of guns. I read the exact same words and get an opposite impression ( the word ‘regulated’ is actually in it). To me it says we can have a National Guard. Very different conclusions. With a shortened approach, it seems there is much more chance of misunderstanding, not a good thing for scholarship.
But it is more efficient, to be certain. But I’m not sure that’s what scholars should care about. But their may be no other viable choice with a MOOC.
Hey Michael, I wonder if you’re comparing “one long monologue” (an academic paper) to a Single Tweet. The thing that I think critiques of Twitter sometimes don’t think too much about is that it can be a dialog between 2 or more participants. It doesn’t have to be one vague paragraph, it can have lots of detail and specificity, but instead of being in the form of a monologue or tablets coming down from the mountain, it’s in interactive dialog form. It’s a tapestry being woven live, and each participant part of the Global Loom has an impact on the evolving tapestry. You might choose a particular color or material of fiber to contribute, but you can’t know what the tapestry will be without the actual process experience of the collaborative weaving.
I really like the form of interactive dialog in that they’re a key aspect of the realness I feel on The Net or in Virtual Worlds. With a monologue it’s kind of me dumping content on whatever journal or audience that’s willing to take it. Although I may not have read the journal yet, what I will eventually read there is already fixed. My reading it doesn’t really impact it. But in an online dialog, in a vaguely Heisenbergish way I suppose, my reading it becomes part of the dialog and the resulting trajectory couldn’t be obtained without the set of participants that chose to engage in it. The Net is alive.
Maybe this is why I go on such tirades when peeps post PDFs. PDFs are dead. I like content on the open, interactive web.
Great points! And I am by no means advocating any major shifts just opening up the conversation for myself and asking how can publication communicate effectively the experience of Practice Based Research in digital realms (like our PBR mooc)? Is there a way the short form essay can be a “portal” to deeper analysis of a topic? What webs can be explored (tangents-my favorite concept this week) and how is the possible for the reader? I’m also questioning as you are “what scholar’s should care about?”
Yes, Molly & Vanessa, interactive dialogue is of course useful, perhaps even vital. But there are areas of investigations that are complex, and easy to mis-interpret without exhaustive verbiage, often coming from one voice.
I suspect that we all three like both approaches, and see value, in differing contexts for both.
Think of how some of the critics of Obamacare used the number of pages of the law ( over 1,000) as a criticism of it. When its length really showed a realistic approach, it showed that the multiple authors had operationally defined and then stipulated every possible contingency they could imagine ( and even so left out a few variants). The critics complained that they actually had to do some work, and read the entire thing (actually, usually its their assistants that end up reading it). But isn’t that their jobs? I think the same for scholars, not just ‘opinionators’ (who of course have their significant place and value).
I don’t argue that short-form is one form of communication, but I just hope that the option of deep, structured analysis, does not become rare. Not a down ‘from the mountain” approach as you mentioned Van ( in fact those tablets constituted short-form edicts) but a full explanation of ideas or opinions, with the space to make the case in specific, detailed ways.
But I’m taking too long to make my point, so should stop 😉
This week in the PBR MOOC we’ve been tasked to create a rubric to evaluate our work. Framing your evaluation was a trick and a skill that I worked hard at in Grad School. I found that if you did not set up the right parameters your crit would veer off into strange unhelpful territories. In a MOOC we are faced with extreme parameters in which our work is viewed– The anonymous reviewer looking at our work digitally for a brief amount of time. How can we use these parameters to benefit our critiques? What does this experience offer us that other forms of critique do not? It’s always a question of how do we connect with our listeners/audiences/readers in the most clear and concrete way possible–maybe even more so within the format of the MOOC evaluation.
Smart questions Molly! Maybe it’s year-end fatigue or something but we (I) havn’t totally run with the Bespoke Rubrics too much yet, but you’re absolutely right! This is a really important and valuable opportunity!
It’s totally November-into-December fatigue for me. Just getting started on this now. Thanks, Van and Molly for helping orient me toward the task!
The Stanford/NovoEd course Practice Based Research in the Arts entered week five and launched a new function —Studio West described in the syllabus as “our bespoke online artist studio space.” I’ve spent the weekend moving into my online studio space and I am trying to understand this new platform/format/function/site. What exactly is Studio West? (More …)
Yes Molly! I think you raise many insightful and important questions about the studio we’ve all been wondering about and waiting for, for the past month. I agree with all your points. The only real answer I can give is that Studio West seems very beta.
I can’t imagine this is the final version since the functionality is so limited. If it is still in development, it may not have the better functionalities you describe before the end of the course. But if it does achieve that, it could still be a nice tool going forward.
Limited as SW is, it’s still nice to see images of our classmates work. That such a crippled Studio West can still be better than NovoED is perhaps an observation that MOOC platforms too are very beta. I imagine platforms like NovoED were launched on tech topics like the famous Stanford Robotics course, and they haven’t really built out to embrace visual culture yet.
For me, meeting new colleagues is even more valuable than lecture content, so I’m eager to see platforms like NovoED, Coursera and iversity have better visual offerings, indexes of students, links to student’s own websites, the option for turned in projects to “reveal creator’s identity” and the option to “reveal peer reviewer’s identity.” The option for privacy here is fine, but I’m not doing all this work to be invisible, I want to meet the classmates whose work I find compelling.
Studio West has gone to Reverse Chron order! Now let’s really move in and take this site for a spin. I agree that the compelling part of this course, Studio West and this site is the ability to connect with colleagues and engage in critical dialogue.
huh… I’m confused… it seems like Reverse-Chron when I’m not logged in, but then when I log in it seems to go back to Chron only…
Aero Bigboots
AlexandreLois1
Ananda Crystal
Andrea Foenander
astrid
Aunt Renie
Aurelia Scheppers
Christa Forster
Ciara Finnegan
Bird on a Cyber Twig
Diptheria
Donnie Archer
Edie
Elle
Emma
Elizabeth Taylor Swift
Fanny
FeelsEmpty
Glad Kidd
Izzy
Jade Ravenheart
Kate Nova
Ken Doll
Mary Anning
Meg O'Ryan
Michael Masucci
Mireille
Molly Ross
Monerda Skute
Myra
Neeva
Newton
Michel Nostradamus
Oona
Oscar
Owen
Patrick J. Sweetman
Paypabak Writer
Pearl Grey
Rebecca Narum
rmarie
Ryan
Scarlett Luv
Sello Tape
Serra Qendra
Teresa of Avila
The Knight
Tiffany Mosienko
TrilbyM
Tullia Aragona
Vanessa
veyot
wendz tempest
Xue
Yellow Fever
Ysidora Pico
Yves
Zsophia
Donnie, and 
Ciara Finnegan are discussing. 
xtaforster and
Vanessa Blaylock 04:14 on 31/05/2014 Permalink |
Thanks for the info Molly! Sounds fantastic! And yes, OUCH! not exactly priced to sell!