Art is the key that unlocks digital literacy
Artistic creativity is necessary for technology, not just for innovation in the marketplace but to realize its potential for participation.
When Arken Museum of Modern Art hosted its first Art & Tech Lab, together with Dries Depoorter and Nynne Just Christoffersen, the goal was to teach participants how to teach themselves.
“It was such a pleasure to watch because it was about diversity and intuition,” says Katrine Pedersen, who is Head of Education at Arken, the contemporary art museum about a half hour drive out of Copenhagen.
Besides her work at the museum, Katrine Pedersen is the author of several books about youth culture in the digital world. A key theme through her work is the immense challenge of digital literacy.
“Digital literacy means to look not just at the screen and what manifests itself there but to open it up and be curious about what lies beneath,” she says. “What we do at Arken is to use art as a point of departure for working with technology and not just digital literacy but democratic literacy.”
Katrine Pedersen cites the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study that finds that young people in Denmark, although they score highest in the understanding of democratic institutions and processes, do not feel that their voices matter outside of voting in elections.
“And that is a terrible paradox, to understand what democracy means but not experience that you are a part of it,” she says. “We invite youth into a space where their own unique relations to the world, their voices and narratives are in focus. That is what art is capable of.”
Taking cues from Arken and merging art and technology in education in general is a way to boost not only critical reflection but also civic engagement among young people. And there are plenty of examples of how to do that.
The future of education is already here
If you look to the United States, there are several high profile examples of educational institutions that integrate art and technology. MIT Media Lab and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU are well known examples, but smaller programs like the School for Poetic Computation in New York also set the standard for how to fuse disciplines together.
A European example of a similar approach is in Berlin. Rachel Uwa is the director of the School of Machines, Making and Make-believe that can be described as an art school for techies or a tech school for artists.
“It’s an experiment to see how education can be different. It’s hovering at the intersection of art, technology, design and human connection,” says Rachel Uwa, arguing that art is critically important as a way of making sense of technology.
“It took someone to be dreaming about flying to outer space to create the concept of what a rocket could do. We need the dreams. Technology for technology’s sake is nothing without an idea,” she says.
Each of the four week courses at the School of Machines, Making and Make-believe is unique and focuses on a specific theme, and the courses never repeat. Putting together a course is in itself a design process that, while it takes a lot of work, is driven by Rachel Uwa’s own deep curiosity about the human connection between art and technology.
“I would basically like to just be the student and just take the classes and have other people do all the thousand other things that go into creating a class in the school,” says Rachel Uwa, adding that the focus is not just on the tech but also on deeper questions, exploring what it means to be human.
“For example, we had an augmented reality class, and so it’s a chance to talk about augmented reality, but also about what reality is in general and from whose perspective,” she says.
From STEM to STEAM
Increasing the number of students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) subjects has long been at the forefront of education policy the world over with an underlying agenda of providing skilled and innovative knowledge workers for a competitive global economy.
Since the beginning of this decade there has been a growing movement in the world of education to add an A for Art to the STEM acronym. One of the key arguments is that adding art makes students graduating from the STEAM fields more innovative and thus more competitive.
However, according to Katrine Pedersen, the economic competition approach to art as well as to technology, is based on an impoverished view of what it means to be human.
“Because in art there are no answers, there is space for questions. There’s not one identity that’s given in advance, there is a multitude. That is diametrically opposed to a commercial space like Instagram,” she says.
Art, she points out, has an enormous potential for honing critical thinking skills and democratic engagement with the world.
“It’s not the product that is in focus, rather it’s those questions and reflections and ideas that emerge along the way. It’s about turning things on their head and not saying, now you must learn to code to be ready for some future purpose like a career or not falling behind some other countries in the world. Instead it’s based on a critical awareness of technology and a human outset.”
The engine room of the future is diverse
The move from STEM to STEAM should be motivated by a desire for inclusion, not only of people whose identities are underrepresented in the world of technology, but also of diverse and alternative ways of seeing and moving through the world.
Instead of a digital world built solely by STEM-trained software developers thus narrowing the available perspectives and worldviews, the STEAM-based engine room of the future could be staffed by people from a variety of disciplines, including the arts and humanities.
“If you take your point of departure in human beings and the reflections and value debates they have, then I believe that we can create technologies in the future that that are diverse and not focused on a very narrow body of expertise like it is now,” says Katrine Pedersen.
