Search results

Het beeld van de wereld / het wereldbeeld van Google

Door programma's als Google Earth zijn we gewend geraakt aan het perspectief van de satelliet, de god’s eye view. Wat doet dit met de relatie die we hebben tot onze omgeving? Door gebruik te maken van verschillende Google-applicaties reflecteren kunstenaars op de veranderende verhouding tot de buitenwereld.

At the Heart of Art and Earth

In today’s technological world, human intertwinement with the rest of nature hasbeen severely diminished. In our digital culture, many people hardly have any direct experience of and sense of connection with “the real” of the natural world. The author assumes that when we want to find ways to mend this gap, arts-based environmental education (AEE) can play a meaningful role. In AEE, artmaking is regarded as itself a way of potentially gaining new understandings about our natural environment. As a reflective practitioner, the author facilitated three different AEE activities, at several times and at diverse locations. On basis of his observations, memories, written notes, audio-visual recordings and interviews with participants, teachers and informed outsiders, he interpreted the experiences both of participants and himself. To this end he employed interpretative phenomenological analysis paired with autoethnography.The artmaking activities researched here aimed to bring about a shift in focus. Participants were encouraged to approach natural phenomena not head-on, but in an indirect way. Moreover, the artmaking process aspired to heighten their awareness to the presence of their embodied self at a certain place. The research questions that the author poses in this study are: (1) What is distinctive in the process of the AEE activities that I facilitate?; (2) Which specific competencies can be identified for a facilitator of AEE activities?; and (3) Does participating in the AEE activities that I facilitate enhance the ability of participants to have a direct experience of feeling connected to the natural world?In this explorative study, the author identifies facilitated estrangement through participating in AEE as an important catalyst when aiming to evoke such instances of transformative learning. In undergoing such moments, participants grope their way in a new liminal space. Artmaking can create favorable conditions for this to happen through its defamiliarizing effect which takes participants away from merely acting according to habit (on “autopilot”). The open-ended structure of the artmaking activities contributed to the creation of a learning arena in which emergent properties could become manifest. Thus, participants could potentially experience a sense of wonder and begin to acquire new understandings – a form of knowing that the author calls “rudimentary cognition.” The research further suggests that a facilitator should be able to bear witness to and hold the space for whatever enfolds in this encounter with artistic process in AEE. He or she must walk the tightrope between control and non-interfering.The analysis of the impacts of the AEE activities that were facilitated leads the author to conclude that it is doubtful whether these in and of themselves caused participants to experience the natural environment in demonstrable new and deep ways. He asserts that most of their awareness was focused on the internal level of their own embodied presence; engagement with place, the location where the AEE activity was performed, seemed secondary. The findings show that AEE activities first and foremost help bring about the ignition and augmentation of the participants’ fascination and curiosity, centered in an increased awareness of their own body and its interactions with the natural world. The present study can be seen as a contribution to efforts of envisaging innovative forms of sustainable education that challenge the way we have distanced ourselves from the more-than-human world.

‘That others may die’

As heavily reported by media in May 2018, Google announced that it won’t renew its contract with the US Defense Department for an artificial intelligence endeavor known as Project Maven. The tech giant took the decision amidst a widespread public backlash and multiple employee resignations. Google was assigned to provide an AI-powered image labeler that would allow the Pentagon to browse a ‘Google-Earth-like’ drone system, according to one of the emails leaked during the scandal.

Google Images, climate change and the disappearance of humans

The Social Web and Learning

On the internet we see a continuously growing generation of web applications enabling anyone to create and publish online content in a simple way, to link content and to share it with others: wellknown instances include MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia and Google Earth. The internet has become a social software platform sailing under the Web 2.0 flag, creating revolutionary changes along the way: the individual, the end-user, comes first and can benefit optimally from an environment which has the following keywords: radically user-oriented, decentralized, collective and massive. ‘An environment in which each participant not only listens, but can also make his own voice heard’: the Social Web. This document describes a brief exploration of this Social Web and intends to gain insight in possible fundamental changes this phenomenon is causing or might cause in our society. Particular attention will be paid to the impact of the Social Web on learning and education. For how do two apparently contrary developments touch and overlap? On the one side we have the rapid growth of technologies bringing individuals together to communicate, collaborate, have fun and acquire knowledge (social software). And on the other hand we have the just conviction within the world of education that young people should not only acquire knowledge and information, but should also have all kinds of skills and experience in order to meet social and technological changes deliberately, and prepare for a life long of learning.

The age of total images

In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’.