"about face"

Just want to jot down what I have experienced in today's "about face:creative engagement" workshop when the ideas are still warm and oscillating in my mind.

Today, we started with brainstorming some of the themes, concepts, and ideas emerging from yesterday's presentations. At first, we categorized them into 5 groups: methodology/evaluation/research practices; epistemology/knowledge/constructions; Education/pedagogy; organization/institutions; Aesthetics vs. process.
However, we constantly experienced some difficulties in deciding which belongs to which. What was interesting to me is I can see how some of the themes and theories and practices I have been reading and thinking have also been reflected and discussed from other practices and disciplines. I think "Translation" is a very telling word describing how people engaging in different domains have to struggle to communicate with each other about those actually similiar concerns but having different appearances. "translation" is a naturally outcome when fields are differentiated and tried to identify themselves.

(This is also resonant one of the groups' disucssion about institution in the afternoon. While we are struggling to lay down a foundation, and to maintain a knowledge base for reproduction, education, identity and autonomy, we are also setting a wall for others to enter into this field. Once the institution is established, later potential members have to learn and acquire that knowledge to be able to contribute to it. come back to this later..)

After that, we broke up into 4 groups following the discussion. The topic for our group was "epistemology/knowledge/constructions". Since this topic is relatively distant from real world practices, it prevented us from expressing ourselves fully. Most of the themes and concepts under this category are very much human constructed, and the condition for us to engage in this kind of discussion is to read similiar literatures and understand some of the concepts, and establish a common vocabulary. This creates some hurdles for us to have productive discussions in a couple hours, especially for us who have just met the first time. To me, it is particulary challenging to get my points across (since english is my second language). I got explicitly feedback that people had troubles understanding me and were kind of uncomfortable sometimes. Getting my point across is hard already, not to mention how to express my points in a friendly and constructive way. But, I felt three of us who are closer to HCI backgrounds tend to share more common ground and can easily achieve understanding. What i learned from this experience is : for people with different backgrounds to discuss productively, we should start with practical topics, so people will have more things to say and contribute, rather than theories. I was a little bit frustrated from this discussion. It seems we have a lot of difficulties to communicate with each other, and I didn't see a coherent theme running across the issues arising. However, when in the afternoon, we need to present our discussion, Sara and Palema did a great job to summerize.

Of the four presentations, the Education/pedagogy group triggered the hottest discussion. I guess part of the reason is many workshop participants have teaching backgrounds, and really have a lot of experiences of some of the issues and concerns. One thing impressed me is the power of politics. The choice of tools, the way to attract students to come, and how to encourage multidisplinary conversation all have something to do with politics. The issue of shared space is also brought up. One example is concordia university, where art students and engineering students share a building, (which is designed to be shared) and this shared space has led to more students to be interested in media art. Another very interesting issue is how students really learn about media art. What is the role of mentoring or more formal education versus learning by online community or other forms of participation? How do they learn outside of the class? Whether we should teach them tools or just principles? What are the differences between studio, classroom and lab? The only difference is space arrangement? What is the core of this discipline, or is there discipline yet? Maybe because I haven't thought about those issues seriously, they all sound fresh to me.

We also think about the future of new media art. How can we have a voice in HCI community?How do these two communities can benefit each other? How can we open and continue the dialogue?( I hear the voice in my heart saying,"If we can do great job and make impressive works, people we intiate the conversation! Everybody loves creativity!" But I know the answer is not that simple) .

Anyway, I stop here today. Tomorrow's opening plenary is at 8:30. (Still feel angry that when I was urged by my starving stomach to go to the networking events to find some food, the food was already gone when I got there!)