Category Archives: education

Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness by Roy Ascott

Edited by Edward Shanken (2003)
Long before e-mail and the Internet permeated society, Roy Ascott, a pioneering British artist and theorist, coined the term “telematic art” to describe the use of online computer networks as an artistic medium. In Telematic Embrace Edward A. Shanken gathers, for the first time, an impressive compilation of more than three decades of Ascott’s philosophies on aesthetics, interactivity, and the sense of self and community in the telematic world of cyberspace. This book explores Ascott’s ideas on how networked communication has shaped behavior and consciousness within and beyond the realm of what is conventionally defined as art.

Posted in art, consciousness, education, media, science, technology, theory

Art Subjects

By Howard Singerman (1999)
Nearly every artist under the age of fifty in the United States today has a Master of Fine Arts degree. Howard Singerman’s thoughtful study is the first to place that degree in its proper historical framework and ideological context. Arguing that where artists are trained makes a difference in the forms and meanings they produce, he shows how the university, with its disciplined organization of knowledge and demand for language, played a critical role in the production of modernism in the visual arts. Now it is shaping what we call postmodernism: like postmodernist art, the graduate university stresses theory and research over manual skills and traditional techniques of representation.
Singerman, who holds an M.F.A. in sculpture as well as a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies, is interested in the question of the artist as a “professional” and what that word means for and about the fashioning of artists. He begins by examining the first campus-based art schools in the 1870s and goes on to consider the structuring role of women art educators and women students; the shift from the “fine arts” to the “visual arts”; the fundamental grammar of art laid down in the schoolroom; and the development of professional art training in the American university. Singerman’s book reveals the ways we have conceived of art in the past hundred years and have institutionalized that conception as atelier activity, as craft, and finally as theory and performance.

Posted in art, culture, education, feedback, history, theory