I’d like to share and discuss the follow didactic method we have been operating for some years now.

There are many ways to teach art in the Academies, it depends on the goal to be achieved. In the course of New Technologies of Art and New Media Art, a 3+2 degree at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Naples – Italy, we train young artists that shall work in smart cities and across digital interactive scenarios.

Our learning activity, fairly innovative in Italy, is based on a daily lab life and almost without frontal lessons; all disciplines are merged and teachers and classrooms work on different projects mixed into a single-flow. Our keywords are relationship, interaction, contamination, cross-over between disciplines, teamwork. Furthermore we consider the error as an essential and vital part of the grieving process.

Over five years students grow by expressing, sharing, debating and questioning their ideas and putting them in practice through a spontaneous creation of a network, exactly like it occurs in the Web.

In order to educate the students on digital and connective thought, theory and practice go together throughout the program of study.

Periodical tests in the form of pitch are carried out in the Lab, while more complex artistic projects are often exposed outside of Academy.

This didactic method is frequently applied also for the thesis. For example, in this discussion we’ll show the interactive sculpture Ch’i – Respiro Cosmico (Cosmic Breath), a graduate thesis realized by a collective of grad students in collaboration with many other colleagues of the Lab and recently exposed in Maker Faire Rome.

Ch’i is an Oriental style dragon, bearer of positivity, wisdom and light, and its poetic represents the reincarnation of Yang. However, because an artist is a visionary, he knows that Yang is only a part of the whole. Thus, the creative process must also reveal Yin, a dark side of the life here summarized in a global crisis, at its peak with the migrant’s apocalypse.

The razzle-dazzle dragon sculpture bears a new life, but to do this it needs to be balanced with Yin.

So, Ch’i has an audible breath, a heart visible under the form of a pulsing light and is connected to the Web by the #migrant. When the #migrant flow increases, a sudden shortness of breath occurs while the heart rate rises. When the flow decreases, the whole pulse slows.

Ch’i – Respiro Cosmico, is a receptor of deeper mining and a vehicle of energies. It increases the awareness we live in a shared world.

In 1965, Ted Nelson proposed a very radical way of using computers. He suggested that they were, already, more powerful as media machines, worked on by everyone, for personal uses. The original paper didn’t get much interest, but when Nelson published his dual-book, Comp Lib/Dream Machines in 1974, at the beginning of the hobby personal computer boom, it became a best seller. It was said that every new employee of the then fledgeling Apple had to read the book.

What I would like to propose is a Talk Session where we revisit some of Ted Nelson’s more radical ideas in Comp Lib/Dream Machines and see where we are today. I make available a pdf of the book to everyone, and bring my first edition copy to the session.

Robin Boast

I’d like to propose a session to test out a simple digital toolchain for humanities (or perhaps any) researchers.  I have been working up an integration of zotero, Acrobat and Word to support the initial work involved in a literature review or other literature based research effort – for example a historical review or a theoretical survey.  The aim is to integrate

• the literature search
• storing reference and citation material
• annotating material
• building commentary
• generating reports automatically

I would love to see what happens if other people take hold of the tools and find out if what I’m doing is useful and interesting to others and if perhaps other people see extensions to or modifications of the toolchain that I haven’t seen.

I propose this as a teach session because I expect it would start with me demonstrating what I now do but I really hope it would turn into a play session.  I would think it would be best as a bring your own device event so that we could start with installing the tools; investigate how I am using them; consider how useful a slightly systematic toolchain approach is; think about whether it could be done better or whether similar chains might be made with different digital tools and how the chain could be extended to integrate collaboration.