Technology and Creativity
Interview by Jeff Craig as it appeared on ACU’s website: http://www.acu.edu/academics/cas/art/spotlights/faculty-spotlights/nil-santana.html
The integration of technology into the 21st-century classroom is an essential part of the ACU experience. However, for professors in ACU’s creative arts programs the use of technology requires – ironically – more creativity.
Nil Santana, instructor of art and design, is among the multitude of professors who take ACU’s reputation as a technologically innovative institution seriously.
Technology as a tool
“Although technology plays an important role in what I teach, I still place emphasis in the creative process. I try to show to my students that any technology is just a tool, and it should not be the end,” he said. “Well, sometimes technology could become the concept and be the object of a project. However, a tool without a person with a creative mind to use it is just a thing.”
For Santana, the use of blogs has made a tremendous difference in his classroom and the way his students learn. He admits never having seen their value in the classroom prior to his adaptation of blogs. Today, they are an essential part of every Nil Santana class.
“Today, there is a sense of communal construction of knowledge. Students are not restricted to the walls of the classroom, nor to me as central figure of information dissemination. Everyone is encouraged to contribute, share and be part of the dialectics. In that sense, there has been a transfer of responsibility and authorship to them,” he said.
Pluses of mobile learning
He believes that ACU’s emphasis on mobile learning has produced three main positive differences in his classes. First, it has created new ways to get and keep students engaged. Second, it has increased the accessibility of information. Third, it has allowed students to communicate more outside of class. However, he believes the merge of technology and education is just beginning.
“To use the cliché – I think we are just scratching the surface of mobile learning. I can’t wait to see the full integration of those technologies with e-books. Nicholas Negroponte from MIT talked about media convergence in the late 1970s. Not many people grasped that concept then. Can you imagine? I am sure he didn’t foresee Apple’s iPhone, nor iPad, but definitely a turn in the way we perceive information – either textual or pictorial. I think this is an exciting time to be part of ACU’s community,” Nil said.
Nil is hoping to further understand the intersection of technology and education – specifically art and design – through his doctoral studies. He is in his second year of dissertation and hopes to defend it this summer.
“Just like any other program, the one I am working on is very rigorous and demanding. That also makes it especially harder when I still need to teach, be a father, a husband, finding time for myself and my personal projects as well. Without a doubt, I am thoroughly enjoying the process and challenges,” he said.
The Average Color of the Universe: cosmic latte
Karl Glazebrook & Ivan Baldry
www.pha.jhu.edu / www.antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov
“The resulting cosmic spectrum has some emission in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a single perceived composite color; cosmic latte.”
Square of oppositions: video
What is video?
Video is a vast and complex medium. Therefore, when taken as a holistic process, it raises problematic of aesthetics, culture and semiotics, as well as modes of presentation and perception.
Video can be understood as the “product and source of multiple practices,”[1] thus the study of video must address the structures and processes of the contemporary cultures in which it operates.
As an attempt to map the initial problematic of my research, I borrow Krauss’ diagram[2] from her essay: “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” and begin with a draft applied specifically to video media.
I start by approaching video not only as a binary opposition, but also as hybrid bundle of cultural and artistic practices, and the result of oppositions between not-cinema and not-television, all under the rubric of the moving image.
The logic I apply is a double negative, video is neither cinema nor television, although the latter has also being the vehicle to which video deserves its expansion and acceptance in today’s culture.
The term trans-generic is applied to moving images not necessarily solely done with cinematic apparatus (cameras, projectors, etc.), used to exemplify works like “Yellow Movies” by Tony Conrad, and autonomous experimental films by Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, and Yoko Ono.
The pair TELEVISION and NOT TELEVISION delineates the field of video art installations such as those made by Dan Graham, Nam June Paik, and Chris Burden.
Question: Should I also consider Internet (YouTube, Vimeo) as a sub-set between this pair?
This is where I find the paradoxical undecidability of video: its intrinsic dialectic is resulted out of the conditions of its invention – the complex of media agglomeration around the viewing monitor, and related presentation modes (video wall, projectors, etc.) is formed in the instability of contemporary social structures.
The combination of CINEMA and TELEVISION has not been resolved yet. This is a term that I need to coin (similar to KINESTHETICS[3]). After conversation with Prof Kim-Cohen and following his advice, I am considering the mix of ‘cinematic video’ … movies produced for television and cinema following a close relation and influences from both fields, narrative, format and language such as Twin Peaks, by David Lynch; works by J.J. Abrams and Polish-born filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski
[1] See introduction of Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture, by Sean Cubitt
[2] It seems to me that Krauss is aware of the comparisons between the Greimas’ semiotic square and the mathematical structure known as Klein group.
[3] Please see “European cinemas in the television age” By Dorota Ostrowska, Graham Roberts
Notes:
Below you’ll find some examples of ‘square of opposition‘ as it is applied to various fields and theories. Originally suggested by Aristotle, this principle has expanded from Philosophy to Mathematics, Linguistics (deep structures) and Art.
A few other definitions for video that I’ve began to collect:
“Video is a recording medium using magnetic tape to distribute synchronized sound and image.”
From the introduction of his book “Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture” by Sean Cubitt.
video
noun ( pl. -os)
the system of recording, reproducing, or broadcasting moving visual images on or from videotape.
• a movie or other piece of material recorded on videotape.
• a videocassette : a blank video | the film will soon be released on video.
• a short movie made by a pop or rock group to accompany a song when broadcast on television.
Bibliography
Krauss, Rosalind. Sculpture in the Expanded Field. Spring 1979
Cubitt, Sean. Videography: Video Media As Art and Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Metz, Christian. Film Language; A Semiotics of the Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
__________. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993.
