[ISEA2015] Panel: Elif Ayiter, Diane Gromala, Mike Phillips & Paul Thomas – Didactic Disruption: Roy Ascott’s Models for Arts Education and Research

Panel Statement

Keywords: Roy Ascott, Planetary Collegium, arts education, arts research, Plymouth University, CAiiA-STAR, interdisciplinary studies

This paper summarizes a panel discussion held at ISEA2015 in Vancouver B.C. Its subject was artist and educator Roy Ascott’s development of models for interdisciplinary studies in universities and distributed research centers.

Presentation intros:

  1. Elif Ayiter – Roy Ascott’s Ground Course                                                                                                The Groundcourse was a two-year long, cutting-edge foundation art course taught at Ealing Art College in London from 1961 to 1964 and at Ipswich Civic College in Suffolk from 1964 to 1967. Its radically innovative strategies never became wide-spread, nor did they extend into prevalent art teaching methodologies in England or elsewhere in the world. Thus to this day, for the most part, the Groundcourse is a well-concealed secret.
  2. Mike Phillips – Dancing on Tabletops (And Other Bad Behaviourables)                                          When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure. Consider the art object in its total process: a behaviourable in its history, a futurible in its structure, a trigger in its effect.
  3. Paul Thomas – Reformatting Art Education Through Viral Transmissions                                    There are many reasons why we want to explore the future and how we as humans respond to the emerging and changing contexts within culture. One of the dominant changes that have taken place is the digital and technology, incursion via systems thinking in art education.
  • Elif Ayiter, Ph.D., aka. Alpha Auer, is a designer, educator and researcher whose creative interests are based in three-dimensional online virtual worlds and their avatars, as well as in developing and implementing hybrid educational methodologies between art and design and computer science. She teaches full time at Sabanci University in Istanbul and is also the Director of Studies of the INode of the Planetary Collegium in Greece. Her texts have been published in academic journals such as the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Technoetic Arts, and she has authored many book chapters in edited academic books. She has presented creative and research output at venues including the John Hansard Gallery, UK; ISEA2011, SIGGRAPH, Creativity and Cognition, SPIE, Computational Aesthetics and Cyberworlds. Elif Ayiter also is the Chief Editor of the academic journal Metaverse Creativity with Intellect Journals, UK.
  • Diane Gromala,  Ph.D. (born 1960) is a Canada Research Chair and a Professor in the Simon Fraser University School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Her research works at the confluence of computer science, media art and design, and has focused on the cultural, visceral, and embodied implications of digital technologies, particularly in the realm of chronic pain. Dr. Gromala was one of the first artists to work with immersive virtual reality, beginning with Dancing with the Virtual Dervish, co-created with Yacov Sharir in 1990. From that time, she has co-founded transdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate programs four universities in North America, and two in New Zealand. Currently, she is the Founding Director of the Chronic Pain Research Institute, a transdisciplinary team of artists, designers, computer scientists, neuroscientists and medical doctors investigating how new technologies — ranging from virtual reality and wearables to robotics to social media — may be used as a technological form of analgesia and pain management. With Jay Bolter, Gromala is the co-author of Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art and the Myth of Transparency. Her work is widely published in the domains of Computer and Health Science, Interactive Art and Design.
  • Mike Phillips is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, Plymouth University (UK), School of Arts & Media, Faculty of Arts. He is the Director of Research at i-DAT, an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and a Principal Supervisor for the Planetary Collegium. His R&D orbits digital architectures and transmedia publishing, and is manifest in a series of ‘Operating Systems’ that dynamically manifest ‘data’ as experience to enhance perspectives on a complex world. He manages the FulDome Immersive Vision Theatre (IVT), a transdisciplinary instrument for the manifestation of material, immaterial and imaginary worlds and is co-editor of Ubiquity, The Journal of Pervasive Media: ubiquityjournal.net
  • Paul Thomas, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Director of the Fine Arts program at, UNSW Art and Design. Thomas initiated and is the co-chair of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference series 2010, 2012 and 2014. In 2000 Paul instigated and was the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth 2002, 2004. Thomas is a pioneer of transdisciplinary practice. His work takes not only inspiration from nanoscience and quantum theory, but actually operates there. Thomas’s current research ‘Quantum Consciousness’ is based on the research being conducted by Associate Professor Andrea Morello, Quantum Nanosystems, UNSW, looking at the visualizing and sonifying the electrons superposition in the development of quantum computing. Thomas’s previous projects investigated silver, the mirror and quantum theories of light and parallel universes in the work ‘Multiverse’. Thomas’s nanoart works include ‘Nanoessence’ which explored the space between life and death at a nano level and ‘Midas’ a study on what is transferred when skin touched gold. Thomas is the author of the book, NanoArt: The immateriality of art, published in 2014.

Full text (PDF) p. 976-982