I shall argue in my paper that the autonomy of the contemporary art school or college has become progressively compromised within its larger context – being a critical part of today’s corporatised transnational university. This has happened for many reasons, but primarily because of the ‘globalisation’ of tertiary education, teaching and research. In a word, arguably, artists who teach the new media arts face cultural, historical and pedagogic situations that are foisted upon them because their institutions have been absorbed into the contemporary bureaucratised Euro-American university system. As a result, the radical pluralism of contemporary art is being seriously threatened or homogenised by the aesthetic, cultural, managerial and pedagogic values of our universities.

Furthermore, practicing artists who specifically teach contemporary art, media and technology are daily challenged by the shifting social role of the university in society and its internal systems of managerial rationalism, its literal, anti-metaphorical art education speak (especially as it pertains to artistic creativity) and its blinding cardinal institutional and pedagogic belief in the exploitative logic of global capitalism and media celebrity culture.

This is further complicated by the fact that contemporary artists who do not submit to this complex economic and cultural zeitgeist of tertiary education for global niche markets become, because of their personal and professional convictions and value hermeneutically critical and suspicious of ‘the administered world’ (Theodor Adorno)

Contemporary art, ideally speaking, as an act is controversial by nature; it is, according to one of its (post)modernist lodestars, Georges Bataille, in opposition to the status quo. So, fundamentally, we need to ask ourselves: What kind of education will suit this specific type of art? Can art schools merging with universities retain or create a pedagogic rationale that nourishes their teachers and their students who seek to question our one shared turning world?

The synthesis of exhibition-based spatial practice and digital mediation is becoming increasingly influential to our understanding of art today. By effectively structuring the form

through which viewer experience, interpretation and interaction with art is entered into, the exhibition acts as the interface that actively mediates between physical properties and social space, producing protocols for viewing and routines of audience engagement. What my preceding interdisciplinary research has referred to as curatorial design proposes a programme for how aesthetic experience might take shape at the intersection of new technologies and exhibition space.

This short paper will position upcoming research on curatorial design and emerging forms of programme architectures. Titled Edge Blending, this project will investigate how concerns relating to the blending of spatial practice and digital mediation characteristic of new media exhibition extend to the construction of encompassing curatorial programmes. In order to do so, the research (which has been supported by a British Council Design Researcher Award) will focus its study on approaches to structured artistic programming recently implemented at FACT, the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology based in Liverpool. By defining the term programme architecture, this paper aims to draw attention to the interdependence between the character of given creative approach (or programme) and the processes (development, design, evaluation) and systems (institutional, organizational, technological) employed in the realization of exhibition projects.

The transformative impact of digital processes on practices associated with

artistic

production, curation and audience is distinctive of the continued evolution of the media/electronic arts.

This paper addresses the symposium’ theme of ‘media arts in the context of contemporary art education’ by presenting an approach to teaching media arts curriculum informed by experimental screen arts.

This approach is founded on the following considerations:

–

Media arts are an evolving arena; it is open-ended and engages with many areas and established disciplines.

– I see these characteristics as strengths – ones that engender exploration by students to discover what media arts means to them and their

practices.

– It precludes medium specificity, technological determinism, and the perceived needs of industry.

– It is project-based and informed by history and theory.

– It is necessarily experimental.

– The subjects I teach are uniquely positioned in the Faculty of Creative Arts (University of Wollongong) where students come from a broad range of study areas including, visual arts, media arts, graphic design, music and sound composition, performance, journalism, and creative writing.

Media arts draw upon diverse areas including experimental film, performance art, installation, sound art, and new media arts. In contrast to a method that seeks to define the field, my approach makes use of this open-endedness in giving students the freedom to explore and discover, as practitioners, what media arts is for them and their practice.

In the last decade, German humanities have developed a broad, general and transhistorical notion of media as “mediality” (“Medialität”) in which any material or imaginary carrier of information qualifies as a medium, from CPUs to angels. (Cramer, 2009)

This paper considers how the notion of mediality, as an expanded conception of media, affects the notion of Media Arts.  If the concept of media arts practice was once chiefly concerned with modern technological forms of audio-visual representation (photography, film, video, etc.) and then, under the guise of ‘new media’, developed  a primary concern with the implications of the digital (electronics, computation and networked interaction), then where are we now?  What are the artistic traditions, forms of practice and bodies of theoretical understanding that lend disciplinary coherence to Media Arts?  My particular interest is in how Media Arts is positioned within the Australian higher-education context.  More specifically, how does it relate to the apparently more general field of Visual Arts?  Is it better regarded as a distinct entity or as crucial new perspective within a mainstream Visual Arts education?  I am leaning towards the latter view, partly because the ‘medial’ conception of Media Arts practice lacks general currency within Australia.  There is the awkward assumption that Media Arts

study will focus narrowly on conventional media and the teaching of industry-relevant media production skills.  The field of Visual Art is at least slightly insulated from these expectations and may provide a better umbrella for experimental media arts practice.  These issues are considered in relation to the development of the Media Arts program within the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong.

The performance arts are an area where many media based and human based art practices collaborate and collide to form cohesive works. When developing skills in students, practical knowledge bases are required in order to develop and express concepts. Studio models are often seen as the most efficient and practical teaching methods, but the efficiency of this process is being questioned as student diversity is being acknowledged. Computers and networked technologies are normal tools of performance arts, and, while current students enter university with high levels of computer literacy, they need to learn how to apply these tools within complex cultural contexts and productions.

This paper will discuss the on line course ‘Sound Design Skills’ as a system through which technological skills

and advanced conceptual skills are introduced to students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. ‘Sound Design Skills’ will be considered as a case study that explores order viagra online media as a tool for developing practical, technological and conceptual

skills in a blended learning environment that explores concepts of sticky knowledge within a networked media based studio model.

In 2007 WAAPA began a new music course that tied a thorough traditional music training with computer programming. The Music Technology Major in the Bachelor of music aims to produce students who can not only program interactive or compositional projects, but have a full capability in a more traditional musical background of

aural training, harmony, history and performance. After initial learning in acousmatics, spatial music, recording, mixing and mastering music, students are introduced to programming through composition and interactive projects using MaxMSP and Jitter, moving on to C sound and the programming of Arduino’s, as well as realtime internet performances. The project based teaching and assessment structure encourages collaboration and performance in the public arena, creating a foundation for a performance research ethic beginning at undergraduate level.

This course is the first of its kind in Australia, and is developing exciting outcomes that may finally solve

the sound art vs music debate, developing learning strategies that combine musical and scientific approaches for a range of artworks with sound as a foundation. The paper discusses the design of the course and how it differs from others, and provides detail on the way programming is taught within a music framework, and some of the outcomes to date.

The production of new media artworks involves a complex network of artists, technical and other collaborators (eg, sound and/or choreographic),

technologies, funding institutions, curators and exhibiting structures all functioning concurrently in a context of cultural, political and technological strata. The people involved become a network consisting (in one language) of nodes and inter-connections. The operating process is a communicative activity best described through Wiener’s cybernetics and the indication of the circular causal loop structure of a system. The connections of the network consist in these feedback-loop structures. They are dynamic yet can develop an intrinsic stability through their capacity to handle variety and perturbation. When they function adequately they can become autopoietic and thus self-generating and self-sustaining. The system of interconnections is rhizomic in general and it is driven or motivated by desire in one or many of its multitude of types.

This analysis is very important for providing an

adequate basis to the historiography of the media arts. In this paper I provide a basis for pedagogical curricula and presentation that uses the framework to bring to the students’ attention the wide range of interconnectedness of the study and practice of the new media arts.

I plan to discuss the history of one of the most unique and dedicated media art courses in the country ‘media arts’. Originally established in

1978 in the outer Melbourne suburb of Bundoora as Preston institute and later Philip and now currently at RMIT in the school of art.

I will discuss current challenges of media arts within a traditional fine art school and issues surrounding multidisciplinary practice and approaches. I will also talk about the history of media arts and its development as one of the first screen based art courses prior to the explosion of ‘multimedia’ and digital technologies and also how

our sensibility as a course area operates in relation to these technologies.

In particular by establishing a more critical framework in regards to new technologies. We are less interested in the latest developments of new technologies for their own sake and more in the cultural histories of various technological media and the ability to combine them with newer ones.

I will discuss the all too common utopian mindset of the wondrous possibilities afforded by digital media which endlessly regurgitates the marketing rhetoric of Apple Mac. Where by creatively is locked into the world of software and the computer lab opposed to an awareness of older, vintage technologies whereby students can achieve outcomes that one can’t in current software.

This paper will discuss shifting perceptions of biological boundaries. In order to solve the problem of development molecular genetics has focused on the genetic material thereby disregarding the rest of the cellular material such as the cytoplasm and nucleus. Bodily boundaries, at all different levels, are perceived as static borders between inside and outside. Whereas according to ideas in relation to Developmental Systems Theory (DST) this understanding of boundaries is problematic because bodily boundaries are active and never sealed. It is necessary for bodily boundaries, on a multitude of levels, to permit different degrees of communication, as Evelyn Fox Keller argues, “cells need to communicate with each other through intercellularsignalling.

DST offers ways for understanding development without relying on notions of gene dominance by proposing that in order to understand the organism it is necessary to investigate beyond its boundaries. This paper will draw on these conceptions of biological boundaries to discuss both my body of work Visible Human Bodies (2005) (created as artist in residence in the Cell and Gene Therapy Laboratory at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute) and Helen Chadwick’s photographic works Viral Landscapes (1988-89) (from my original research held at the Helen Chadwick archive at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK). Through this discussion of these works I intend to explore the notion of biological boundaries as active and permeable as well as evoke notions of the boundary between the interior of the body and the exterior environment as ambiguous and constantly shifting.

Video and performance art are highly visible in contemporary art and artists, curators, students and academics at all educational levels are responding to this trend through their own work. The difficulty in Australia is that there is very little access

to historic and contemporary Australian video and performance art so students and academics find themselves looking overseas for inspiration.

The Australian Video Art Archive (AVAA) was founded in 2006. The aim of the archive is to provide an on-line educational hub which showcases new and historical Australian video and performance art works in the form of a database. These works can be viewed on-line or rented for educational, research and exhibition purposes. The lack of knowledge of Australian

video and performance art is predominantly due to the scarcity and fragility of documentation but we have found that this documentation can be collected, archived and disseminated.

This paper will summarise the development of the AVAA highlighting key works in the database. The AVAA will have enormous benefits for curatorial practice and scholarship by contributing to the understanding of this important contemporary art genre.

[http://www.videoartchive.org.au/]