[ISEA97] Panel: Rachel Schreiber (chair) – Theoretical and Practical Approaches to Electronic Arts Education

Panel Statement

As the market for teaching jobs in the fine arts becomes increasingly tight, colleges and universities are able to seek out candidates who can cover a variety of media. Many of the teaching jobs advertised today require the ability to teach electronic media, be they jobs in photography, video, painting, sculpture,  printmaking, or ceramics. Professors teaching most traditional media rely on the approaches to teaching that medium that they encountered in the course of their own studies. Those of us who are currently teaching electronic media are faced with novel challenges, for most of us are teaching material that we never studied formally, but rather learned on our own. Each of us develop assignments, course readers, and theoretical frameworks without much knowledge of what is being taught by our peers. The purpose of this discussion will be to share resources and ideas, both theoretical and practical, among educators, as well as to inform other artists about some of the current approaches to teaching electronic media. Issues to be covered include:

  1. What are the conceptual implications of the ubiquity of the computer in out society?
  2. How do we address generational differences in thought processes — how does this newest generation see and use the technology they have grown up and feel comfortable with? How can their needs be addressed while not excluding students from other generations?
  3. How do we as educators keep current with technologies that change so rapidly?
  4. Do models of education from other media apply to teaching new technologies, or are entirely new models called for?
  • Rachel Schreiber (U.S.A.), Panel Chair, is a video artist, photographer, writer, and professor. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1995, and in 1995-96 she participat­ed in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Currently, she teaches photography, video, and digital imaging at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana. Schreiber has been making work on issues of Jewish American identity since 1990. Much of her work has focused on a critique of how representations of the Holocaust effect contemporary conditions of desire. Her most recent videotape, Please Kill Me, rin a Faggot Nigger Jew, is an investigation of the practice of Nazi-fetish based sadomasochism. All of the interviews for this experimental documentary were conducted on the Internet, and the majority of the imagery was shot onto the Macintosh using a Connectix camera. Schreiber’s videotapes have screened internationally at such venues as the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the New York Video Festival, the Women in the Director’s Chair Film and Video Festival in Chicago, the New York Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival, the London Jewish Film Festival, and the World Wide Video Festival in The Hague,The Netherlands. Her writing has been published nationally in such journals as the New Art Examiner and Davka: Jewish Cultural Revolution.
  • Joseph DeLappe, USA, is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno and the head of the Digital Media Studio in the Department of Art. DeLappe was the first MFA candidate in computer art to graduate from the CADRE Institute of San Jose State University (1990). His works in digital media, ranging from manipulated, experi­mental photographic portraiture to interactive, digitally controlled installations and electro-mechanical sculptures have been shown nationally, and internationally. Recent exhibitions include installations at the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, Florida, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, New York and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada. Past recipient of a Southeastern Regional National Endowment of the Arts Visual Artist’s Fellowship and a Nevada State Council on the Arts Individual Artist’s Fellowship. This past fall, he was a visiting artist at the Department of Photography of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
  • Kristine Diekman (U.S.A.) is Ia video artist and educator currently living in Kansas City where she is Assistant Professor at Kansas City Art Institute. She will be moving to San Diego in the Fall of 1997 where she will be organizing a new video program at California State University at San Marcos and teaching in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. Before moving to Kansas City, she lived and worked in N.Y.C. as an on-line editor. Her work shows and is distrib­uted internationally, most recently at the New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center; Pandemonium at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London; and the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück. She has received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The Women’s Project of the Funding Exchange, and most recently from the Missouri State Council on the Arts. She has curated and presented video programs nationally including Language and Disorder, and Vernacular War Landscapes: Writing Over the Maps, at University of Arizona’s Videotensions. She received an undergraduate degree in English Literature and Chinese Studies, and an M.F.A. in sculpture from R.I.S.D.
  • Cinthea Fiss (U.S.A.), UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA, TAMPA, USA
  • Fred Endsley (U.S.A.), SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, USA