Future Art Education – New Challenges? 30.11.2018 | Fotomuseum Winterthur

SITUATION #149

Stock photography, tagged with: #walk #art, #business people, #grey, #background, #gallery. Source: canstockphoto.de/galerie-gesch%C3%A4ftsmenschen-31226549.html

Post-photography, post-digital, post-internet: What does it mean to devise an educational programme around questions of the photographic in a time when almost everyone carries a smartphone in their pockets – devices for image consumption, production and distribution – and the internet has become part of almost all aspects of our everyday lives? What are the new challenges in the field of art education?

To address these questions, Fotomuseum has invited Torsten Meyer, professor for Art Education with a focus on contemporary media culture at the institute of Art & Art Theory, University of Cologne, and Kristin Klein, research assistant in the field of art and didactics and the Post Internet Arts Education project. The project Post-Internet Arts Education focuses on the changing conditions of arts and cultural media education within the framework of an “internet state of mind” (Carson Chan). It aims to develop educational theories and strategies in response to artistic and media innovations of the twenty-first century.

The event will take place in German, in the exhibition space of SITUATIONS/Lab (Grüzenstrasse 45).


PROGRAMME

18:00 Welcome address

18:15 Lecture by Torsten Meyer
Databased Imaginary – Mediological Perspectives of the Post-Internet Image

The world is changing, and so is art. The further the twenty-first century advances, the further the topics addressed by artists extend beyond the traditional boundaries of high culture and its conventional genres, into a media-dominated everyday world. Today’s digitally networked media have spawned an entirely new cultural and social environment that has become home to a generation of digitally savvy individuals who dwell in the realms of social media, taking photographs with their telephones, watching TV on YouTube, and creating their self-images on Instagram. They carry cyberspace around with them in their pockets. They take for granted that their normality is based on social, political, technological and economic change brought about by digital media, and, feeling no need to address the reasons for these conditions as such, they adopt a fundamentally different approach to the (photographic) image.

What do these changes of the world mean for the status of the image, or for the visual arts in which the organization of the image through central perspective was once a fundamental given? What does it mean in terms of presentation and formation in the context of the arts, and for the cultural education of a next generation?

19:15–20:15 Workshop with Kristin Klein
Just Click and Apply? On the Speculative Stretching of Stock Photographs

Conventional stock photographs are imbued with cultural codes that embrace traditional notions of space, of individuals and behavioural norms. They tend to be reproduced in easily recognisable, if somewhat exaggerated, forms while at the same time constituting a reserve of images speculatively catering to a number of future possibilities and potential applications. These photographs, often produced in image factories, thus contribute to the formulation of future scenarios. In this workshop, examples of stock photographs in the context of museum architecture as well as selected works by the DIS collective will be used as the basis for a new structural approach to reverse the perspective: Which (future) museum visits are conceivable and how might this impact stock photography that is meant to constitute them?

More by Torsten Meyer: medialogy.de

More about the project Post-Internet Arts Education: kunst.uni-koeln.de/piae