Context and history of art and design education
In last weeks lecture we spoke about the basic conflict running between art and design and that it was about the material as a noisy place and things were fragmented. Today we speak about how it seems like such a controversial thing to say, how the transformation in the way we think about culture, however its not a new thing, if we go back we find an endless tension between the noise and an order of art and design, its a constantly occurring debate. The noise is seen through a new technology the complexity of this is the noise, visualising raw data is a reduction of that raw nature it simplifies the nature of the raw data for example in this heat map, its an extraction and it filters things out.
Artists tend to go towards the raw data where as designers focus on trying to quantify something complicated into a simplified way to digest it quickly for example info graphics this heat map is in between the two it takes something complex, and gives us a simple way of visualising it, but the aim isn't to simply but to generate a new kind of complexity, it foregrounds a problem rather than finding a solution. The strategies are half way between art and design, and they have strong political issue behind them The hostility of the idea started approaching around the first world war, Henry Adams (1905) tells us what it is but then how nervous he is about it as a concept because we will loose the pulling together that is needed because of the war time this was a social problem it was more positively received when literally modernism emerged, the functionality of modernist thinking and the artists and literally modernism were linked closely. Gertrude stein starts to produce work focused on the idea that the fragmentation of experience, but doesn't like the idea of narrative seen as ordering framework, she's interested in fleeting qualities of experience.
For example the subjectivity of time, personal experience rather than the clock on the wall she was interested in conflict about how you experience that time at different points, like if exited time goes quick, and time in a boring place is slow. Think about it in terms of experience form individuals you get variability of the individual feels at the time, the fragmentation of real time on a clock clouds this. In multiplicity this is good because it’s a real representation. The experimental modernist ideas talk about quality of experience, different emotions fading into each other a style of writing from a design perspective that is dislocated, including long sentences because everything is related to each other. Experiments it with the form of writing itself, fighting through narrative convention, critical of the idea you can tame experience with design lead writing. William James a Pragmatist creates universal solutions and asks the question what can we do for now to get the problem to go away, a tie between 'pragmatism' and the more grounded form. The experience is rich and noisy and dependent on individual experiences. It introduces the idea that the phrase 'stream of consciousness' the way in which the noise unfolds, 10:10 happy 10:12 unhappy, that moment between changing your mood, the reel of emotions you run through, the rise and fall of emotions, is a complex web and intensive picture, entwined with memory jealous is a good example. Because it makes you troll through the memories, they assert themselves into your head, when remembering we choose to recall something but a triggered memory can just arise. Also in connection to the 'stream of consciousness' it implies there’s logic to this experience, but you have to think about it more sensitively than a design approach to thinking about the way subjective things progress. Its not a rant, not just in arts but in science, in terms of complexity theory, a picture is occurring of how order, a clock for example. Arises out of complicated situations. Stanford Quinter an architect comments on how lots of things impact each other and uses snow crystals as an example and how they create geometric cultures, resulting in how beneath the beautiful form there is a generated noise. Democracy is being grounded by a material noise of society some are not represented unless everyone is counted for, the government sometimes calls for a referendum- when everyone who has voted, gets bypassed and the representative has the say. we have to acknowledge the social is more complex than the abstract image of democracy leads us to believe.
Duey says the way we think in art and design has an importance and the theories are heavily influenced in and by the Bauhaus, Duey is important because its the idea that you cant rely on any certainties that’s happening around you he stresses the idea of intelligence over reason, the point is reason is a platonic ideal of education, logical form of thought whereas intelligence is more associated with forgetting the principles and making intervention that will work for now, the making of them is important.. From a constructivism point of view the acknowledgement that you build things like the physical of drawing they are seen as a craft. We need to account for normal experience an everyday experience is what everything arises from. We concrete the provisional nature of things and the activity for doing, going along with making or designing anything because it’s a craft and they recognise there’s a process to it. Bauhaus issue...
As a Bauhaus issue James Elkin does a brief introduction in to can art ad design be taught, using noise vs. educational reason. Pre-Bauhaus before 1919 there were early attempts to balance theory and practice they tried to teach perspective-using maths. There were massive problems in doing this in art education because art is about innovation, it weakens work and produces decorum, middle of the road work, with no drama of postmodernism or modernism. The Bauhaus want a transformation in what people produce but also how we think about art, they want multiple perspectives (multiplicity). They wanted to increase visual sensitivity and help students learn to see and learn the qualities of perception. Overall there was a shift in agenda, rather than the effects of noise in the experience turning to the idea of universal human perspective, but questioning do we all respond in the same way?
