Rosa von Suess / Bernard Loibner
"in the neo-liberal culture of spectacle, established media art turns out to be a servile handmaiden ... we're not interested in representations, we're interested in collective creations." (studierende@vis-med.ac.at)
Just at a time when media art educational facilities threaten to mutate into "Cadre Workshops for Killer Apps"*; when, for example, the media group of TV channel Pro7 "is getting involved on a project-related basis" in the course of study offered at the Media House of the Berlin Institute of Arts; when the German National Railway Corp. kicks off its new ad campaigns at the same academy and takes the opportunity to threaten universities in general with mandatory autonomy and to suggest they had better hurry up and find "associates" in the private sector; and just at a time when the introduction of tuition fees in Austria brings forth a sigh of relief throughout the EU for this thankless pioneering achievement, students of media art find themselves afloat in a conglomeration consisting of
a.) proposals and demands having to do with their market-viability as entry-level personnel for big corporations and consulting firms,
b) efforts to promote social acceptance of the "useless" years spent studying,
c) restructuring efforts and the lethargy of institutions of higher learning, and
d) ambitions to establish programs to further the careers of elite students on the part of a media sector widely regarded as innovative and profitable.
Juxtaposed to all this is the open structure of research, within which open, discursive action is possible: a laboratory as a learning environment created by the learners themselves. Students become stations, transmitters, channels-facing the problems themselves, developing lines of thought, presenting critique. Knowledge transfer proceeds reciprocally, democratically, at eye level, and in a dynamic learning environment-an anti-hierarchical, democratic, "open" model that calls for stability and a "transparent" system featuring procedures that are clear to all participants.
Students of visual media design at the University of Applied Art in Vienna-prototypical media artists and workers of tomorrow, as it were-transfer parts of the university's research lab to Linz for the duration of Ars Electronica 2001.
The sum of the lab's areas of endeavor can be described as a hybrid of a programming workshop, Web agency, sound studio, social lounge, lab for 3-D animation and media critique, game development center and party space. During Ars Electronica, work on process-oriented projects will be carried on, previous works will be presented, and debates will be held with visitors. There will also be collaborative sessions with invited students from other universities and institutes of art in order to formulate and discuss proposals about future needs in a course of training specifically tailored to the media arts.
An open source platform will be presented on location and via Internet; within it, work can be done on media-specific projects, and brainstorming about potential scenarios for artistic study in the field of media art can take place.
Within this temporary laboratory, it is not the students themselves (and their guests) that are being exhibited; rather, it is a process that is meant to be launched in the field of tension and interplay situated between the dynamism of the new economies and the ideals of an educational sector that has come under pressure.
The applications of the "new technologies," a key sector upon which the economy's hopes are riding, are increasingly referred to as causal, and the university system apostrophized with terms like "output oriented" and "economically viable." Under these circumstances, the question that arises is how a university or school of art defines its role within the current media scenario?
Questions like:
... does the course of study configure students into society's nice, well-behaved yes-men and -women, and a functional workforce for the media business and the art market? Is the Enlightenment ideal of education shifting in favor of a corporate-sponsored system of furthering elites? What does a course of study even mean for those laboring on the "construction project Internet"? Who's teaching / learning from whom here? Anyway, don't strict curricula just tend to hobble along several steps behind current developments? Could partial self-organization, free classes or project-oriented approaches be potential answers to these problematic issues?
will be addressed, as will the question of the spheres of activity of media art itself.
The works, performances and interventions to be presented illustrate the changed methods of representation in the field of media art. Conventional systems and pathways within the field of media art representation seem no longer to be endowed with the importance that they mutually attribute to one another.
The contributions will be moderated by the students themselves or in cooperation with individual teachers and invited guests. The list of participating artists is posted on the project's website at http://lab-ac.at/ars2001.
Note
*(telepolis 6/2001 on the establishment of a postgraduate program for the development of applications and mobile devices for third-generation cell phones at the Institute for Art and Design in Zürich, or for the training of specialists in this field within the Academy of Arts.)
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