Pedagogy for Digital Cultural Practices

The scope of my teaching is essentially defined by what I recognize as a profoundly new techno-social phenomenon. The new techno-social phenomenon is what’s sometimes referred to as “digital cultures” and “digital cultural practices”. I’m of the opinion that we’re on the cusp of a major social and cultural change which will be as resounding as the Industrial Revolution - of course I’m not the only person to maintain this - but I take it as my pedagogical mission to build educational experiences, both classes and programs, that appropriately skill students to be well trained, well rounded professionals in this new area. And that necessitates a radically trans-disciplinary mixing of engineering, computer science, a wide range of the arts, parts of the humanities, not to mention social sciences, and increasingly the biosciences.

If there is a new techno-social context defined by computing and networked communications, then what do people need to know to work fluently, and in a well informed way in that new context?

They need to know the social history of technology, the history of creative practices in those fields, how to use those technologies on a deep technical level. All that has to be put together as a new kind of qualification. And that’s why it was really important that when we established the ACE (Arts, Computation and Engineering) program I didn’t want it to be housed in any particular school because it simply doesn’t cut it to establish a program in computer art within a school of the arts. Not only do you not have all the requisite expertise in a school of the arts, but you also have this kind of restricting disciplinary world view: “It’s all about self expression, or all about creativity, and yes, we teach Photoshop.” That is no use. But likewise, you can’t establish in a school of engineering and say we teach reverse kinematics and power systems for embedded controllers and yes, we have one seminar a year on the social implications of technology. That’s equally useless. You’ve got to be able to mix the technical, the creative, and the historical and philosophical. That’s the crux of the ACE program and of my teaching.

Sometimes I teach practical, technical classes like “gizmology.” Gizmology is a made up word obviously. It’s basically an introduction to mechanics, electrics and electronics for art students and others who want to build working electromechanical systems, including sensing as sculptural interactive installation. It’s a diverse skill set, very practical, all about hands on, making it work, making it stay together, not letting people electrocute themselves, not chopping their fingers off—all the practical issues of how you make an actual kind of interacting machine system which integrates electronics and mechanics. And centrally its about developing the skills to pursue a project from idea, through design, parts specification, and prototyping, to final presentation. It’s relevant not just for people in the arts who might be doing anything like kinetic sculpture to mechanical theatre sets or design. But it’s relevant to people who have an interest in animatronics, mechatronics, theme park kind of amusements, interactive museum exhibits, not to mention in a sense it’s an introduction to robotics, because robotics is about interfacing computational tools with the real, physical world. It’s hard because the physical world is full of dirt and noise and not nearly as predictable as the computational world. The computational world is defined by rules. But the real physical world is defined by exceptions to rules.

I also teach more historical, theoretical classes such as the ACE Interdisciplinary Theory Seminars. The one right now is called Embodied Cognition in Digital Cultures. That’s a radically cross-disciplinary, theoretical engagement with different disciplines on the subject of embodiment with respect to technology. We look at robotics, cognitive science, situated anthropology, the history of technology, phenomenological critiques of technology, a whole range of different approaches, and we attempt to stitch it all together.

Hybrid vigor is a term from genetics. It’s the opposite of inbreeding. Implicit in adopting hybrid vigor as a motto for the program is a critique of the walls that rise up between disciplines on university campuses, and what they obstruct in the process of protecting themselves. Once a discipline is established builds a particular view of the world and its place in it. But the world changes, the world is in flux. These structures resist change. People have careers, vested interests, and institutions have vested interests, and these things resist change. But we’re now confronted with a new context which requires a new kind of educational approach. It will not fit into those traditional disciplines. So hybrid vigor is a way of saying - look - if you take the subject matter of computer science, and you take cultural studies and put them together, you inevitably produce something wild, and vigorous and complex.

In the ACE Program, we’re in the process of admitting between 8 and 10 students for fall 2003, nominally three in each of the participating schools. I’m very pleased that we have one Fulbright and possibly two in the first year’s intake. We’re hiring two faculty members right now. We have 10 program faculty from across the campus. That number will increase. We’re currently renovating a small premises. The program will start small. Buildout is 10 students per year for a two-year master’s program. We offer three different master’s degrees: MS Engineering concentration ACE; MS Information and Computer Science concentration ACE; and MFA Fine Arts concentration ACE. They are school-based master’s degrees in their respective schools. What’s important about the structure which I’ve put in place is that all students take the same core of graduate classes for about 60% of their class load. So this structure allows students to build a community which is cross disciplinary, and at the same time specialize in particular technical areas.

In fact it’s an indication of how timely the program is that a number of the applicants already have graduate degrees, but are choosing to come and do the ACE program in addition, or they have established professional careers in the area before they come here.

We’re bringing together three schools that usually seldom talk to each other. According to the disciplinary structure of liberal arts universities, engineering and the fine arts are at opposite ends of the spectrum and that’s actually replicated in the architecture of this campus. Engineering and fine arts are diametrically opposite, as far from each other as you can get. This circular plan is a great metaphor, like a compass. If engineering is north, then the fine arts is south. That was obviously the conception of the university architects which is a product of a history of the academic disciplines which dates back to the 19th century. Engineering is all about proof, mathematically based rationalism. The arts is grouped with metaphysics and emotions, and all the things that don’t fit into the scientific method. But it’s all coming together in our society now. That’s precisely the challenge of digital cultures—that kids don’t distinguish in that way. They grow up digital. They make no distinction between a programming language and constructing an interactive narrative. And in a sense there is no difference.

The university doesn’t seem to recognise that they’re admitting students who’ve been playing computer games since before they could talk, and writing computer code, and doing computer animation and building their local area networks in their dormitories and bedrooms, for years. They’ve been doing engineering and computer science and the fine arts all at the same time with no distinction. When they come along to university and somebody in some department says “ half of what you do is engineering, and half of what you do is the arts. Those are different things and you have to choose.” Then you’re effectively taking a hatchet and chopping that student down the middle. That does a violence to the psyche of that student and it squanders the intellectual capital that student has built up. Those students will go on to shape the digital cultures. It won’t be you and me, or the deans and professors of this university. It’s the people who are freshmen and sophomores right now. They’re going to be the Speilbergs, the Leonardos and the Shakespeares of digital culture. The university ignores this at its peril. The students will do it anyway, with or without the help of the university.

Are other universities recognizing this fact?

I established my first interdisciplinary media arts program in 1989 (at University of Florida). At that point it was a progressive thing to do. There were some universities that already had programs and some art colleges already had programs in the field. But it was definitely a minority thing. By the mid 1990s a lot of institutions were recognizing that this was something important to develop. Now, in 2003, UCI is trailing the field. San Diego has had a center for research and computing in the arts for 30 years, and has recently established an entirely new college of arts and technologies. UCLA has a well established department of Design Media Arts. UC Santa Barbara has a well established graduate program in Media Arts and Technologies. San Jose State has one of the longest-standing programs called CADRE. There is a major international research center at ASU (Arizona State University), the Institute for Studies in the Arts, which has been a leader in the field of technologies in the performing arts for the best part of a decade. The Chicago Art Institute has long had an entire department of Art and Technology. Georgia Tech has a very rich and complex area in the combination of cultural practices and computer science. NYU has had a longstanding program in interactive telecommunications. I went on to Carnegie Mellon after the University of Florida to take part in the development of several initiatives there, which included an interdisciplinary concentration in art and robotics. So there are a lot of programs both in the UC system and outside. UCI is definitely playing catch up at this point.

That’s not to say that the particular flavor of the ACE program is not progressive. Two things distinguish the ACE program from many other programs. The first is that it commits, centrally, to interdisciplinarity. The second is its focus on real time computing and interactivity as being the defining characteristic of digital culture. Older digital arts programs are often premised on specific kinds of media output. So quite commonly we see programs that concentrate on computer animation, or digital video or Web design. Clearly those are based in the traditions of animation and filmmaking, or traditions of video and graphic design in the case of web design. Other programs somewhat more specialized in the fine arts area concentrate on actual paper output - computer graphic painting and drawing kind of practices. As far as I’m concerned, none of those programs identify the key important quality of the new techno cultural phenomenon. All are emulating previous practices: filmmaking, cell animation, etc. They all start by emulating previous practices. Of course that’s necessary; in every new technology we see that. But the ACE program centers on real time computation-facilitated automated behavior. We are building new cultural practices with systems which respond to their environment in real time. This is a new creative territory. In conventional desktop kind of interactivity we have the human user make some action, then the computer responds to that action with some kind of display. The paradigm is this one-to-one relationship between one human user and a system which responds. What’s important is that the system is exhibiting behavior and the behavior is manipulated as an aesthetic variable. We put this kind of interactivity into a larger context where it’s not just someone sitting at a desktop computer poking buttons and pushing a mouse around.

What happens when 120 people are all working with handheld live geopositioned interactive devices? What kind of cultural practices will emerge out of that? What happens when you have 5 people in 5 different places all in the same immersive stereoscopic virtual reality environment working or playing together? How do we do that as a cultural practice? What happens when we’ve got 250,000 people all at their desktop computers in their bedrooms and offices joining in a virtual environment? That is happening right now; this is part of the contemporary context. We’ve got entire virtual communities with people from all over the world interacting by the manipulation of avatars in computer graphic 3-D environments. This is profoundly new. They might be playing a medieval battle simulation game, or designing a new car in a corporation with offices in the United States, Japan, Germany and Brazil. They might be engaging in some sort of affinity group that connects people with some particular interest, say in a historical period or a kind of motorcycle, the might be interacting with synthetic autonomous agents. From all over the world, they’re all doing this thing together. So here’s the aesthetic question: what kinds of behaviors, what kinds of linking of the ongoing behavior of the human user and the ongoing behavior of the computational system makes good art? We don’t know. Nobody knows. What I try to do in my art is explore precisely this territory. And it’s what the ACE program will address in a range of different practices.

How does this relate to Cal-(IT)²?

The broad research agenda of Cal IT is to map out new communications and information technologies that will hit the market in 10 - 20 years. So the mission of the Arts Layer in the UCI Division of Cal IT is to similarly be forward looking in terms of the new techno-social and techno-cultural practices. That means on the one hand studying cutting-edge emerging practices such as massively multi-user role playing game environments, and seeing what’s actually happening here : what kinds of social structures are emerging; what kinds of ethical issues are emerging; what kinds of new technologies are emerging. What kinds of new ways of representing information are emerging? How can we look at these kinds of environments and see them as adaptable to different practices like educational practices, like research practices, like disaster management practices. In the Game Culture and Technology Lab, the agenda is to look at what is happening right now, but to take it further both technically and in terms of cultural practices. How can we build on this trend, how can we facilitate and enrich it with all the resources of the university? That’s the mission of the Arts Layer in general. I’m specifically referring to the gaming culture, which is one component of the Arts Layer, but it’s an indication of the way we’re looking at technology: we’re doing technology development.

We recognize that the arts community has historically prototyped new media technologies . There’s a long history of new media technologies developed by artists. You can go all the way back to photography. Was Daguerre a chemist or a physicist or even an optician? No, the man who developed photography was a realist painter. In own era, it’s not well known, but that icon of virtual reality, the data glove, or what became known as the power glove in the 1990s in Nintendo’s hands, was developed with a National Endowment for the Arts grant a good 10 to 15 years before it was reinvented at NASA. Artists have prototyped media technologies 10 to 30 years ahead of the curve. There’s very important historical work to document this. A substantial part of all the digital music and graphics, digital video technologies that are now part of every off-the-shelf home keyboard or broadcast digital video manipulation system, or desktop computer graphic system , were developed by artists in their garages, underfunded, no NSF grants. The academic technical community and the industrial community seem to believe that the role of artists in their practices is to come into a research program at the end and make it pretty. This is what in the Siggraph community is referred to as making a “cool looking demo.” And that’s what artists were considered to be for, to make the cool looking demo. I’m sorry but that notion is demeaning of artists and does not deploy the skill of artists in the place where they’re most valuable. Because the place where artists are most valuable is in the blue-sky, first-cut envisaging of the potentials of new technologies being brought together in different ways and being placed in different social and cultural contexts. Artist are trained to do that, to look at the big picture. Engineers are not. If you want to be an engineer, the discipline encourages you to focus in and in and in, because you need to demonstrate proof of some particular kind of behavior or phenomenon. It has to be repeatable by the community in controlled circumstances, otherwise it’s not real. And if it’s not real it’s like cold fusion, your career is broken. An engineer who’s oriented in that way is not trained to think about the larger social implications of what they do. They’re not trained to think, say, about what this might do to the autonomy of indigenous cultures. Not trained to think about the environmental or ecological implications. Not trained to envisage how this might mesh into society and what kind of disruptions might occur. But artists are trained to take all these issues into consideration in the process of making a work.

How are the different faculties and disciplines coalescing, collaborating at UCI?

It’s in the early stages now. We have a terrific group of faculty who come from specialized disciplinary areas but who recognize the importance of this enterprise and want to be involved. They want to take part in the building of a new interdisciplinary context. And interestingly a lot of them are already interdisciplinary. Gloria Mark is in computer science but has experience in the creative arts. Robert Nideffer is in studio art but comes out of sociology. Falko Kuester is in visualization (in EECS) with a background in mechanical engineering. The faculty involved in the Cal-IT Arts Layer are similarly cross-disciplinary and in fact there’s a cross over between the arts layer and the ACE program. The Game Culture and Technology Lab is a great initiative and that’s largely been formed by four colleagues Robert Nideffer, Celia Pearce, Walt Scacchi and Antoinette LaFarge, along with myself. Those people are the core of the group. We formed the entity, we have research projects and now we’re out looking for funding.

I hope that the ACE program and the Cal-IT Arts Layer together will function to prototype emerging digital cultural practices and to appropriately train a new generation of professionals in the field. I see the ACE and Arts Layer as being complementary and synergistic. The ACE program is the pedagogical wing; the Arts Layer is the research wing. One of the reasons I came to this campus is the opportunity within the context of Cal-IT to establish a research program which maps onto the graduate program which I proposed to establish on this campus. The arts layer is also keen to be engaged in research collaborations with industry, and we’re involved in establishing some of those right now.

My background is in sculpture, installation and performance. As an undergraduate I began to build interactive installations. First mechanical systems, then electro-mechanical systems, then sensor-driven electronic systems. They always were concerned with a person engaging electronic systems by physical movement and gesture, and having an effect on them. This was before the desktop computer. So as computer technology became increasingly sophisticated, I kept pace with developments. And what I realized was that I’d been doing interactive art long before the term interactive multi-media became current. And my concern remains the question of how we integrate the enormously rich dimensions of embodied human intelligence with computational systems. That’s all to do with building sensor technologies, interpreting sensor data, building systems which behave and respond to human users in a way that’s intelligible and culturally engaging to human users as cultural artifacts. My practice is related to my research and teaching interests. For me this is a profoundly important problem: how do we integrate the way we are as people with each other with these new technologies? And I have to say that in general the industry and academic research has not addressed these issues very well. We still sit hunched over, staring at a flickering screen, punching little buttons, getting stiff in the neck and getting RSI and having degrading vision. Why? Because we’re forced to encode our thoughts and concerns in very particular ways that are digestible by the machine. And if we don’t encode them in little ASCII text symbolic button presses and xy positions indicated by a pointer device, then the computer remains ignorant of them. As I’m sitting here talking to you, there’s hand gestures, gaze, tone of voice. All these things are important dimensions of human-to-human interaction. As I move about in the world, I’m integrating my feeling of pavement under my feet with my all-around acoustic sensing, with my vision darting between close focus and the far distant focus. All of these things are rapidly integrated with my actions. So there’s a huge amount of the complex richness of being a person which computer technology is completely oblivious of. I resent the fact that we are forced to filter our experience in a way that’s digestible to the technology. It’s not very good technology, is it, if we have to so constrain our activities to make them digestible to the machine? Give me a break, this is the 21st century. I would like to see computational systems which understand more of the complex dynamics of human behavior. I think that we deserve a technology that comes closer to sharing our experience of the world.

Sometimes I’m asked are you an engineer, or are you an artist? This is not a simple question, and it is one which I spend a lot of time thinking about, given my position and my practice. The question revolves around two axes: the issue of the differences between engineering and art, and the nature of interdisciplinary practice. As I mentioned before, Engineering is characterised by a focusing in, Art is characterised by the exact opposite. Engineering is telephoto, art is fisheye. Both practices are specialised, but the axes of their specialisation are orthogonal. But the fields do have commonalities, one being the commitment to real physical demonstration, the production of object lessons and artifacts that ‘stand up’ in their different ways, in the word. So I don’t see the two as incompatible. The two practices attend to different aspects of the work. I draw upon a diverse range of knowledge and practices from the arts, from the sciences, from the humanities. My work demands I do all of those things and integrate them. You can’t be an expert in all of those areas and also have a big picture. It’s hard because there’s always the possible criticism that you’re a dilettante, a jack of all trades and, implicitly, a master of none. I see it as forging a new specialization because there’s centers and peripheries to all disciplines, and to say that someone is master of a certain territory is to say they’re a dilettante around the edges. We’re just defining a different center and a different set of edges.

Job descriptions and career paths are changing. Ten years ago there was no such thing as a web designer, no such thing as a webmaster. Now it’s an established career. I know people who apply artificial intelligence to the behavior of autonomous agents in online games. That kind of practice didn’t exist ten years ago. There are so many rapidly emerging areas of practice that are mixing aspects of the fine arts, aspects of computer science, engineering, aspects of philosophy and critical theory and cultural studies, that these disciplinary distinctions don’t apply anymore; they’re just not relevant.

Why did you come to UCI?

I wanted to start a cross-disciplinary graduate program. UCI advertised a cross-disciplinary position between engineering and the arts. I explained to Deans Beck and Alexopoulos that my goal was to start a cross disciplinary graduate program, and as we continued to talk they embraced the idea. We all know what has happened to the UC budget in the last two years. It was my bad luck that this coincides with the period between when I interviewed and when the ACE program was approved. Given that, the university has been very supportive of the program. But it is establishing itself on a shoestring and will only flourish with better funding. We need better facilities to be competitive. We have lost students to better funded programs. I would be so pleased if we could get to the position of having some kind of endowment like many of these other programs have. At present I can’t bring luminary guest practitioners and theorists in for a lecture or a master class because I don’t have a budget for it. I can’t take my students to a major conference, or symposium or festival in San Francisco or Tokyo or Istanbul or Berlin because I don’t have funding. That’s what makes a program rich in the educational sense, having that kind of flexibility to really connect with the world.

This program has enormous potential. Basically the whole of western culture is in a process of rapid change. It’s mixing disciplines in a way that haven’t been mixed since the 1800s. Someone’s got to grab it, and run with it. Lots of people are, and we can play a part. I would like to support increased interdisciplinarity on campus. I would like to see an ACE faculty position or cross appointments in several schools on campus with which it is not currently formally affiliated. The history of marginalization of the arts on US campuses is a problem: the arts are seen as pretty things, but ultimately not of the same intellectual mettle as other disciplines. I don’t share that view. I would like to see growth in Science and Technology Studies on campus. This is an important new field, present on major campuses such as MIT, Cornell and UCSD. It is relevant to our campus and very relevant to the ACE program.

One hopes the campus will come to recognize the importance of the area of research identified in ACE and see it as not simply a kind of plastic flower in the hat of the university, but as something that is critically engaged in the contemporary social changes, on academic and technical levels as well as on the cultural level.