Radical Lessons: Avant-Garde Influences in Digital Classrooms

Description

As an artist/designer, my perspective of the Bauhaus is intertwined with the concurrent avant garde art movements of Europe, such as Dada, Surrealism and Expressionism. Numerous assignments in the classes I teach build upon the legacy of those movements, and I have found myself considering other aspects of historical artist communities that might be useful in imagining the future of digital learning.

Online learning and working in computer labs can be isolating experiences, very different from the lively studio communities of the past, or art communities outside of academia. My presentation will share examples from my coursework that seek to get students away from their screens and engaged with social communities. I will highlight how contemporary artist-run spaces and experimental education platforms draw from the history of the avant-garde-such as the School of the Alternative operating as a reimagined Black Mountain College in the mountains of North Carolina.

As a web designer, I will share my perspective on new possibilities of online interfaces, and lead a discussion about how online learning, and the web in general, might become less corporate and more radical (creatively, socially, and politically).

This idea of updating lessons from the past to create more radical and communal learning experiences fits under the "Berlin" topic of global communities. The discussion of how to reimagine LMS and web interfaces would lead to speculation about the future of digital learning.

Takeaway

By examining some historical highlights from the Bauhaus and avant-garde art communities, I want to show how elements of experimentation and play (parties, costumes, games, etc.) can offer new possibilities for digital media education. I want to avoid excessive romanticization of the Western canon, but believe that selectively pulling elements from that history into our digital present can be valuable, especially given the centennial celebration of the Bauhaus.

Besides sharing my own assignments and interdisciplinary approach to pedagogy, I want to share some broader observations about digital culture that suggest a need for more social and experimental online experiences, as well as new possibilities of web design that might make that possible.

Expanding on the presentation, attendees will brainstorm other elements of avant-garde culture that might make their way into online experiences, imagining new possibilities for social pedagogy online or in the classroom.

Abstract

As education and careers in the arts continue to rely on screen-based experiences, how can we maintain the social vibrancy of creative communities and avoid a corporate future of loneliness? Formal lessons from the Bauhaus school are well represented in art education, but the social and radical attitudes of the European avant-garde are less common in the world of digital art and design.

I will share course assignments that have sent my students on map-making expeditions and public interventions, and describe how my online students have collaborated via physical mail. In these projects, and other examples from contemporary education and web design, I will show how picking selectively from the bones of Modernism can offer new possibilities in our fragmented digital world-including a discussion of how our learning interfaces and the web itself might be reimagined.