Fantastic Bubble Science and Media Arts

I don’t mean to be plugging the LA Times again, but it is the only newspaper I get, and there was a great article today on how a number of scientists are on the production teams at Dreamworks animation studios. This is another good example of how media arts is not only interdisciplinary, but “integrative” in the seamless interweaving of disciplines, and pushes the creation of new knowledge and content. In the article it is explained that these high level aeronautics and physics scientists sign-up for this work, not just for the money, which is better than their normal research salaries, but because it is so interesting and exciting to solve these kinds of fantastical problems.

In a small, utilitarian office in Glendale, Ron Henderson methodically jotted down equations for Isaac Newton's Three Laws of Motion on a whiteboard next to his desk. The equations, the physicist explained, are the mathematical building blocks for constructing a three-dimensional, bubble-like sphere. Henderson could easily have been preparing a lesson at Caltech, where he once was a faculty member. Instead, he was at DreamWorks Animation's Tuscany-style campus, doing his part to bridge the divide between art and science. Henderson was explaining the math behind a fluid-simulation technology that would help artists working on the upcoming movie "Home" draw soap bubbles inhabited by a race of diminutive aliens called the Boov.

In this way, media arts provides a culturally based product, a fantasy film, to investigate and create very technical and complex virtual events and experiences. This is applied engineering and design, loaded with in-depth knowledge of physics, math, 3D modeling and programming. Putting students into teams to solve these kinds of problems, albeit at a greatly simplified level, may provide a bit more motivation to learn the math, by seeing it in action, testing it, and playing with parameters towards a mind-bending, and believable result.  

When I learned the basics of the Unity game designing platform, I soon realized that the sky is not even the limit to what I could produce there. Literally, one begins with a black, infinite space, and infinite variables in the various forces of mass, resistance and gravity to work with. I fairly easily designed a primitive game, with a basic table top platform, a dozen blocks, and a rolling ball that could move the blocks. The idea was to maneuver the ball around certain blocks, while pushing others into place, without falling off of the table top. This actually gave me a tangible sense of the algebraic formulation of these variables like I had never known before. Suddenly, I experienced what algebra was really about! And it was fun and exciting!

Students should at least be provided the opportunity to apply these math skills in this kind of environment while they are learning the processes in pure abstraction on paper. And perhaps someday, it would make sense that the system could recognize the value of this kind of production as evidence of actual mastery.

Media Arts as Cultural Consciousness

We tend to think of learning and art making in schools as the mastering a set of information that is already known, such as the various techniques of drawing and painting discovered throughout history. We appear to teach students only what is already known about a subject, with the idea that they can transfer that knowledge to new situations in career or college. With media arts, students are in the position of actually contributing significantly to current knowledge, because media arts is centered in the processes of creativity and learning themselves. Students can utilize media arts forms, tools and processes in order to collectively learn and communicate directly their own ideas, perspectives and understandings of a topic. They are active participants in a culture of learning that is larger than the classroom, just as media arts exists in our contemporary global society.  Thus, media arts enacts the process of learning itself, as a culturally based process. Students develop cultural content with the possibility of a reciprocal cultural response.

We can see this concept illustrated in the controversial situation described in an LA Times article about a student-produced newscast in Carlsbad, California, which aired a film examining the issue of immunization. The film has raised the ire of local anti-immunization activists, who have accused the students of collaborating with corporate pharmaceutical interests. The students were initially interested in the idea pitched by a local pro-immunization group. They began to take up the investigation, but this group tried to lead and even direct the students. The students resisted this and decided to research it for themselves to create a balanced perspective. They came to own this process and came to their own conclusion that ultimately agreed with the pro-immunization group. This has escalated into a rather dramatic and public battle on this impassioned issue.

Without getting into the details of the argument itself, nor the students’ role in a social controversy, the story itself describes perfectly the nature of media arts in the learning process. Media arts is a vehicle for expression and learning, more than it is a contained package of content. That is how it functions within our media-based, global culture. In that sense then, media arts is a form of “cultural consciousness”. Media arts education replicates that formation within the school system. Students that produce media arts products are engaged in the actual process of cultural formation.

Students engaged in this process are learning a large number of things simultaneously. Of course they are learning about media production and marketing. They are learning how to create intentional media that effectively expresses a point of view. Through research and writing, they are gaining expertise in the content of the film, “immunization”, its history and its supporting and detracting arguments. But more significantly, they are learning about this “cultural consciousness” that media forms as a “dialectic” around its understandings and intentions, and that they can play an active role in its formation. This is a form of “media literacy”, that is an inherent part of media arts education. Ordinarily, students play a passive role in our society. They are seen as “not ready” to fully participate in the world. Here, students are in the middle of a social controversy, and are understanding how emotionally charged and serious information and expression can be in our world. Media, or information, attention, and communication are elements of power in the formation of our culture. These students have literally “struck a nerve” with their production, and are gaining lifelong learning in the process.

New National Media Arts Standards: Structuring 21st Century Learning and Creativity

The June 4, 2014 presentation of new National Media Arts Standards is a historic development for arts education, if not for 21st century education as a whole. Most simply described as “interdisciplinary digital arts”, including video, animation, multimedia, game, web, apps, and 3D objects and spaces, this new K-12 subject area functions as an integrative “hub” discipline, or "virtual maker space" for creativity and learning, where students can create almost any production, design, event, or experience imaginable. Just think of the possibilities of a "holo-deck" (just like the Star Trek laboratory) for the support of learning and creativity! Media arts presents extraordinary promise to engage and empower students, and to support the transformation of the educational process through real world projects, productions and experiences. Students are thus placed into the center of the learning process, through complex projects that apply core content within authentic contexts. This supports both the usual acquisition of facts and formulas, as well as an “enactive” and “constructivist” pedagogy, whereby the student has an active role in constructing his or her own meaning through their productions and designs for local and global communities. 

The collective endorsement of “Media Arts” by the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards is a leap forward for the arts in education. Media arts is a 21st century discipline, reflected within our media infused, global culture, which will remain relevant to young people even as it continues to evolve. By its very nature, categorizing this rather amorphous, evolving, and intersecting discipline is an innovative leap. It exhibits the unique ability of the arts to literally "think outside of the box" and embrace change. The "traditional" arts disciplines (Dance, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts) have therefore supported media arts to develop its own intrinsic specializations for the integration with, and mutual benefit of all arts and academic subject areas. It actually posits a novel understanding of the arts and aesthetics, to which technology and media add an amplifying aspect, and which the traditional arts disciplines would have been unable to coherently co-develop. 

The Media Arts Standards are designed to reflect this inter-connective, dynamic area. While avoiding limiting specifics in evolving technology and forms, they primarily describe the production and design process across conception, development, production, refinement, presentation, and analysis. Beyond that, they present the iterative design process in innovative problem-solving, artistic capacities in experimentation and risk-taking, and the connecting processes of media arts in forming culture and collective understanding. Media arts pedagogy is aesthetics, production and cognition-centered, with a cultural level of implementation. Students are thus active cultural participants as producers and designers. This is where the metacognitive nature of media arts comes to the fore. Not only do students construct and learn from this new content, they are in the position to directly learn about the learning process itself, both at individual and cultural levels. This “student-sourced” form of learning, "dissolves the walls of the classroom" to bridge current divides between subject areas and between student and community for a multiplying "culture of learning". Stay tuned as media arts continues to grow, develop, and is adopted by states and districts across the U.S.!

Media Arts Education: 21st Century Learning and Creativity

          Media arts is a newly distinguished, nationally available, “5th arts content discipline”, that encompasses cinema, animation, imaging, sound, interactive and virtual design, including game, app, web, 3D and multimedia design. This dynamic assembly forms an intersecting, “creative hub” that can integrate any and all arts and academic content disciplines in interdisciplinary, project and design-based forms of learning. As a virtual “maker studio space” for creative expression and inventive design, students can share their points of view, research, experiment, and present information about their communities, and construct entire interactive, virtual worlds.

         Within this creative, virtual space, where students can produce or design almost anything imaginable, students are fully engaged in the learning process through authentic, 21st century practices. They work together to discover and solve problems through the creation of cultural products and experiences, actively representing and enacting their new knowledge. They realize for themselves the tangible rewards and connective power of learning. They come to govern and value the process of learning itself, towards becoming self-directed, lifelong learners. Media arts forms the potential for a connective, “culture of learning”, that "dissolves classroom walls" across the local community and the larger world.

         Consider these examples of media arts education in action:

•             Students are challenged with designing a sustainable community on Mars. They produce media arts projects to investigate, develop and present their findings and propositions to scientists and their community: multimedia portraits and interactive maps of their local community; investigatory documentary and news segments on the various aspects of environmental, Mars and Earth science; models and prototypes of new technologies necessary for settling on Mars; animations and games about the adventure and technical challenge of travelling to and thriving on a remote, inhospitable planet; and animated, virtual 3D architectural renderings of their proposed community. (NASA/JPL)

•             Students engage in online cultural exchanges with classrooms around the world, exhibiting their local communities, their ideas and dreams, academics, culture and arts, and the issues and challenges of their society and environment. Through various “transmedia” channels, students can produce and share: news, academic presentations (TED), dance, poetry and music videos, interactive games, live theater and music presentations, interviews, streaming chats and twitter feeds, etc. They can interact and reflect on each other’s educational methods, cultures and consider potential future collaborations.

•             Students produce historical video games, which incorporate a diverse range of skills and concepts, such as: visual, spatial, and interactive composition, character design, story development, environmental design, game theory, spatial and interactive computations, code, script-writing, psychology, marketing, interactive motion physics, 3D surface rendering, etc, all based around the content knowledge of a historical setting.

•            Limited English Speakers work collaboratively with fluent English speaking peers on a variety of video production projects and formats, including talk shows, cooking, reality, game, drama, and talent shows. They must actively utilize and expand their language fluency in examining, analyzing and evaluating media examples, and then in collaborative, organizational production processes, and in playing various roles in the productions.

•             Students construct a virtual environment, with limited space, time and resources, where they must learn to collaborate and negotiate in order to maintain peace and avoid conflict, all while designing sustainable cities.

       Media arts brings the arts and design fully to the center of learning as a holistic and culturally based process. Given the wide range of mediums and forms available within media arts, and its capacity for integrating all arts and academic contents, the possibilities for students’ applied creativity are endless, and the potential for student learning is limitless. "Media Arts", as a core, PK-12 arts discipline, will be available by Summer, 2014, for formal educational adoption and usage by all states and districts, through the development of voluntary standards and assessments by the NationalCoalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS).