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.