continues to evolve to include perspectives on globalization, mass media, and ideologies based on race and religion.
From these points of intersection, we investigate critical digital making, as a space for artists and educators to engage with digital media to reveal structures disempowering individuals and explore digital practices amplifying democratic voices in contemporary global society. The main objective of this collection is to examine new media artmaking and pedagogy to inform critical theories in digital media and literacy, engage in practices of new media and social practice as critical theorizing, and to problematize making as a contemporary fad for meaning. Many art educators embrace critical theory as foundational for research and knowledge construction, impacting how the field approaches curriculum theory, art criticism, and visual culture (Desai & Darts, 2016; Quinn, Ploof, & Hochtritt, 2012; Tavin, 2003). Many contemporary artists explore the aesthetic and conceptual impact of the “pedagogical turn” of their work within critical interventionist and socially ←3 | 4→engaged practices (Kalin, 2012, 2014). Critical digital making looks to add to discourses on critical pedagogy, action research, and the synthesis of critical social theories for reflexive practices in arts teaching, learning, and research to impact what it means to make something in our digital world.
A ROADMAP FOR CRITICAL DIGITAL MAKING
Important to this collection is to better understand the alignment of critical social praxis with digital art making. Sjoukje van der Meulen points out in his 2017 Leonardo article “A Strong Couple: New Media and Socially Engaged Art,” there is an “antagonism” between new media and contemporary art critics (van der Muelen, 2017, p. 117). As social art-practice scholars like Pablo Helguera (2011) and Tom Finkelpearl (2013) have written, the lines between critical pedagogy and social practice in the art community are blurred, yet focused writing and research on digital technology as an art material, method, or communication device in spaces of social art practice are underreported. Concurrently other scholars have addressed the connection of digital making and learning but not as art practice. Kylie Peppler, Erica Halverson, and Yasmin B. Kafai’s two-volume series Makeology (2016) introduces the emerging landscape of the Maker Movement and its connection to interest-driven learning within a variety of educational ecosystems, spanning nursery schools, K–12 environments, higher education, museums, and after-school programming. However, Makeology does not focus on new media, social practice, and arts education despite a rise in interest for media-based arts.1 Jentery Sayers’ collected volume Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (2017) explores the interdisciplinary character of experimental methods and hands-on research to “make” things in the humanities, attending to a different set of creative disciplines and orientation to critical theory than the visual arts. Matt Ratto and Megan Boler’s (Eds.) DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (2014) examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, citing the diverse forms of political participation and “critical making” emerging in recent years. The authors and artists in Ratto and Boler’s collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging to video production to knitting and the creation of community gardens. DIY Citizenship concentrates on autodidactic learning in informal contexts without much attention to the relationship between curricula and arts education. Several book collections offer a closer focus on new media, activism, and the arts (Hertz, 2012; Lievrouw, 2011; Raley, 2009), but continue to miss the dynamics of integrating new media, broader forms of social art practice, and pedagogy which is at the heart of this collection.
Our goal for Critical Digital Making in Art Education is to explore the facets and complexities of contemporary digital making as meaningful and critical ←4 | 5→praxis in a world full of injustice, othering, and indifference. Critical digital making mines the importance of digital making and knowledge formation. It values the performative qualities of pedagogy and social practice as aesthetic forces within the communities and civic structures that we operate within as artists, educators, and learners. To this end, the collection is organized into three thematic sections: formation, co-construction, and intervention. Formation focuses on relationships of digital materiality and new media as it relates to learning, making, and knowledge creation. Co-construction focuses on the entities, constituencies, and alliances emerging within social practice as creative endeavors in new media. Finally, intervention focuses on the role of artists and educators in the active creation of civic life through forms of activism and participatory practice that is part of critical digital making. In the following, we elaborate on these three themes by offering some context through contemporary art practice and how the collected authors in this volume contribute to each theme.
FORMATION: DIGITAL MATERIALITY AND NEW MEDIA
In the first section of the book, the collected chapters focus on the formation of digital texts where process and materials are integral to critical digital making. Important to this thread are elements of material meaning extending aesthetics and pedagogy, beyond instrumentalism, and more into the material performance of digital media. Digital materiality is a conceptual exploration of matter’s impact in our world by consolidating the physical with the virtual. Despite being wrapped in computer algorithms, digital objects are inextricably linked to our physical environments creating symbiotic, relational, and performative ontologies commingling in digital and physical realities. A prime example of this is Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke’s edited 3D Addivist Cookbook (2015) showcasing the critical practices of over 100 artists working with digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing. The 3D Addivist Cookbook takes a critical perspective on these technologies by asking questions about what technological innovations allow us to make, and to question, reshape, and critique these technologies through art practice. The portmanteau of “additive” and “activism” frames “movement concerned with critiquing ‘radical’ new technologies in fablabs, workshops, and classrooms; at social, ecological, and global scales” questioning “whether it’s possible to change the world without also changing ourselves, and what the implications are of taking a position” (Morehshin & Rourke, 2015, para 3). Allahyari and Rourke’s focus on these performative aspects shows a conceptual shift comprehending the impact to digital aesthetics and pedagogy must be in tandem with its existence in a material world. Formation is at the nexus between the material and the digital with an awareness of digital making’s effect ←5 | 6→in the world, doing something commensurate with our bodies, social environments, and classrooms.
It is precisely in these forms of material and code that informs research surrounding digital making and arts learning. Whether it is Kylie Peppler’s (2010) notion of media arts or Robert Sweeny’s (2015) focus on new media art education, contemporary digital learning and media scholars are mapping out ways old and new technologies collide in spaces of learning and
