href="#ulink_df578260-03ae-54a7-bb19-10f7f4ca302b">An Introduction to Critical Digital Making
AARON D. KNOCHEL, CHRISTINE LIAO, AND RYAN M. PATTON
When Apple Inc. reached a $1,000,000,000,000 market valuation during the summer of 2018, the six most valuable corporations in the world were technology and digital media firms. However, the acceleration of computation and digital networks in our globalized society has not led to increased opportunities for social mobility despite this unprecedented capitalization (Krause & Sawhill, 2018). Instead of making the world a better place, there are concerns that these technology firms are engaged in surveillance capitalism as the primary purpose (Zuboff, 2019). Recent criticism of this industry has highlighted how these technology companies are violating user privacy (Gross, 2019; Romm, 2019; Schaer, 2019), being socially irresponsible (Haynes, 2018; Lou, 2018; Maheshwari, 2018; Osnos, 2018), and having racist and/or sexist corporate cultures that are also reflected in the algorithms the tech firms develop (Cameron, 2019; Gralla, 2016; Lee, 2018; Noble, 2018). As digital technology and media have become more ubiquitous, forms of digital art making referred to as new media have also evolved to critique and speculate on our technological future as a part of our everyday lives impacting pedagogical discussions. Historically, new media art has been understood as experimental forms of time-based media often involving works native to computers, computation, or relying on computers for the art’s redistribution (Manovich, 2003). As a broad category, new media art includes digital art, animation, virtual reality, bioart, Internet art, physical computing, and interactive media to name just a few. Important to the concept of new media art is the open-ended possibility by focusing on the new, but also be embedded within a continuum of technological innovations. Artists ←1 | 2→working in new media are often critically engaging with the rapid changes associated with technology’s effect on society by looking to the future and reflecting on the past.
It is within this milieu of new media we situate this collection of essays through the conjunction of terms: “critical digital making.” “Critical” relates to forms of praxis found in much of modern and contemporary art that engage with forms of social and cultural power that are present and distributed inequitably in society. “Digital” asserts the post-industrial, technological epoch we are living in, and “making” refers to a generalized process of construction broadly connecting material play and meaning-making formerly perceived more narrowly as the domain of art. Critical digital making draws from critical art theories, cultural studies, and media studies, but most importantly, invokes discussions of social practice and pedagogy through the sociocultural dynamics of digital making. Critical digital making shares similar concerns Philip Agre (1997) raised when he coined the term “Critical Technical Practice.” He summarized the term as “one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique” (p. 155). Michael Dieter (2014) further suggested critical technical practice as an approach to bring cultural criticism to the complex issues between aesthetics, new technologies, and social power. Dieter’s concern about the conflicts and tensions of a contemporary digital society to the humanities mirrors the struggles and pressures of including new media in art education. In addition to the humanist approach to technology that a critical technical practice invokes, we encourage a pedagogical use of technology in art, building on community experiences of those who may or may not have expertise in the technological tools being used. Thus, critical digital making is our approach to intervene in issues through localized dialogue and learning experiences in the arts. The intersection of social practice, pedagogy, and critical theory is the heart of this approach to new media art.
Social practice has been called a number of different names: socially engaged art, community art, new genre public art, participatory art, interventionist art, and collaborative art (Bishop, 2005). However, the definition of social practice is dependent on the involvement of the audience as the primary component of the art medium (Helguera, 2011). Social practice works may variously incorporate traditional studio media, performance, social activism, and community engagement. Importantly, artists and creative practitioners producing forms of social practice consider the unique contexts and characteristics of the community and environment within which they are working. Social practice has been lauded and admonished as being responsive to neoliberal practices of replacing government-run social services with volunteers, and creative entrepreneurial solutions (Davis, 2013). However, this critique of social practice highlights the desire for communities to be more connected in an increasingly fractured world mediated by ←2 | 3→digital technologies, viewing art as a means for developing community and agency within our civic structures.
Pedagogy, on the other hand, is the preoccupation in educational research and curriculum theory focusing on the interactions between teachers, learners, learning spaces, and the objects of curriculum filling that space (Murphy, 1996). Derived from the Greek term paidagogia referring to the education and attendance of young boys, the term pedagogy experienced a resurgence in educational research in the 1970s for connotations capturing the complex interplay of the art and science of teaching (Simon, 1981). In this sense, pedagogy is a meditation on the performance of teaching and the sociocultural factors impacting learning, knowledge formation, and access. Seminal texts such as Paulo Freire’s (1968) Pedagogy of the Oppressed positioned pedagogy as an interpretive act combining social, cultural, and political factors. Reflections on issues of pedagogy consider a complex interplay of social codes, practices, and knowledge (Hamilton, 1999).
It is not surprising critical theory enters educational discourse through pedagogy. Critical theory stresses reflective assessment and critique of society and culture by applying knowledge from the social sciences and the humanities (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002). Critical theory is used and applied as an umbrella term for theory based on critiques of economic and social inequity and injustice stemming from Marxist traditions. Critical curricular theorists utilized pedagogy as a means to examine how schools systematize inequality and the power of teachers and students to exercise agency in constructing a “particular version of what knowledge is of most worth, what it means to know something” (McLaren, 1998, p. 165). Originating in Great Britain then moving to the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the critical pedagogy movement emerged by applying concepts from critical theory and related traditions to education and studies of culture (Kincheloe & Steinburg, 1997).
