Edited by Mel Alexenberg

Educating Artists for the Future

In Educating Artists for the Future, some of the world’s most innovative thinkers in higher education in art and design offer fresh directions for educating artists for a rapidly evolving post-digital future. Their creative redefinition of art at the interdisciplinary interface where scientific enquiry and new technologies shape aesthetic and cultural values offers groundbreaking guidelines for art education in an era of emerging new media. This is the first book concerned with educating artists for the post-digital age, propelling artists into unknown territory.

A culturally diverse range of art educators focus on teaching their students to create artworks that explore the complex balance between cultural pride and global awareness. They demonstrate how the dynamic interplay between digital, biological, and cultural systems calls for alternative pedagogical strategies that encourage student-centered, self-regulated, participatory, interactive, and immersive learning. Educating Artists for the Future charts the diaphanous boundaries between art, science, technology, and culture that are reshaping art education.

The thesis describes the development during the 1990s of visual artists' utilisation of computer-based interactive multimedia and the production internationally, with a focus on Australian artists, of artworks on the CD-ROM media format. 
Earlier parts of the author's research led to the exhibition, 'Burning the Interface < International Artists' CD-ROM>', which he co-curated, opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 1996, before touring to Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide.
The thesis surveys the range of practice by artists working with digital media and the opportunities for exhibition in the public spaces of museums, galleries and the street, and advances scenarios for correcting the laxity of response by the exhibiting institutions to the vigour with which Australian artists represented their work and ideas at this time in national and international forums. 
Four published artists' work on CDROM are analysed in detail, and a concluding chapter about 'interactive multimedia' and its usefulness as an art medium to the artist introduces the studio practice component of this MFA submission. This takes the form of a prototype 'experimental' version of an interactive multimedia work on CD-ROM, ('Strangers on the Land') a copy of which is contained in a pocket at the rear of the bound version.

http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/unsworks:586

Gidney, E. (1991). “Art and Telecommunications: 10 Years on.” Leonardo 24(2): 147-152.
The author argues that telecommunications constitutes a new, postindustrial international dimension and that the nature of artists’ work in this medium differs radically from that of most earlier art forms. This paper provides an overview of artists’ work with telecommunications systems and gives a brief history of some significant events of the last 10 years. The creative development of the medium by artists is described, and an emergent new paradigm of interactive work is discussed in terms of cultural theories of communication.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1575285

Phillip Bannigan and Sue Harris

Australia is in the process of establishing its first electronic arts network. The technical and economic environment for creating an online network for artists and their advocacy bodies is favourable in that affordable public networks are widespread and most arts organisations own personal computers.

Phillip Bannigan and Sue Harris Leonardo, Vol. 24, No. 2, Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications (1991), p. 227

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1575305