WILD for Art
My name is Lance Rautzhan. I am an artist/educator with an active studio practice, a large body of work and curriculum vitae that includes an extensive exhibition, publishing, and teaching and residency history. If you’d like to check out my work and learn more, my website is www.lancerautzhan.info. I am also in my second semester as a student in the Master of Professional Studies, Art Education program at Penn State (World Campus). I am heavily influenced by the artist/educator, Joseph Beuys. Like Beuys, I make no distinction between my studio practice and my pedagogical practice. For me, teaching is a product of art. My Action Research Project for the MPS Art Ed program, which is the culminating experience of the degree program, is focused on new media and pedagogy. Specifically, I plan tocreate a new mobile art making application and social media platform to inspire transcultural social justice education initiatives to erode stereotypes and generate situated knowledge toward global social justice. If you would like to see the first draft of my research proposal, it is available on my blog at https://sites.psu.edu/lancerautzhan/2018/05/03/aed-815-exploration-6-reciprocal-reflexivity-1st-draft-research-proposal/and a very rough and early example of what that app may look like here https://sites.psu.edu/lancerautzhan/2018/04/26/aed-811-future-vision/. This project lead me to LDT 505 as one of my foundation courses required by the MPS Art Ed Program. I hope to learn more about existing technologies and applications and how best to design and implement them in my quest to create something new and beneficial to the field of Art Education. It is through this lens that I read Pea and Maldonado’s “WILD for learning: Interacting through new computing devices anytime, anywhere”.
“WILD for Learning” introduces several key concepts important to understanding today’s mobile art making and education applications and initiatives. Art making comes in many forms, photography, drawing and music to name a few. Today, many, if not all, mobile devices come equipped with a camera. This alone creates the potential for art making. Current access to a plethora of applications further expands the possibilities. The I-Phone in particular comes equipped with several apps that have the potential for creation including I-movie for video editing and Garageband for recording and music production. Beyond those capabilities in-device, I-cloud and Bluetooth allow for sharing and synchronization across platforms. Pea and Maldano point out that, “the ‘satellite’ design of handhelds makes data back-up possible by regular synchronization with a desktop or laptop computer” (2007, p. 861). This feature enables the user to begin a project in the field and pick it up later in the studio. Utilizing any of these apps for art making is a fine example of “a WILD use Roschelle and Pea (2002) categorized as ‘act becomes artifact’” (Pea & Maldano, 2007, p. 864). The “act” of utilizing a drawing app such as Adobe Illustrator Draw for I-phone leaves the “artifact” that is a digital drawing that can be later returned to on a different platform or even printed and manipulated by hand. This example touches on (no pun intended) the idea of stylus driven interfaces as Adobe Draw is optimized for Apple Pencil. Finally, for the purposes of the artist and art student, Heidegger’s concept of ready-to-handis of particular interest. His philosophy describes “objects whose design allows us to remain engaged in the tasks to be accomplished, rather than to focus on the devices themselves”(Heidegger, 1927/1973: Winograd & Flores, 1987 in Pea and Maldonado p. 855, 2007). In line with Heidegger’s assertion, art students are trained to use media such as pencils and brushes and over time and with practice those tools become an extension of the artist’s hand. The same can be said for mobile art making. As mobile technology has developed it has become more intuitive. Perhaps it is not only a matter of advancing technologies but also that their use is more ubiquitous today and therefore the learning curve has shortened dramatically. Mobile art making and education applications and initiativeshave taken their place along side other well-worn forms and have potential for growth limited only by the imagination.
References
Roy D. Pea, Heidy Maldano. WILD for learning: Interacting through new computing devices anytime, anywhere. K. Sawyer. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.852-886, 2006.