some ideas on art, technology and society....

A+T+S : THE MEETING OF ART, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY


Swarming, flocking, tweeting, face booking: the combination of social media with technology in the past ten years has demonstrated some of the real potential of technology. Technology alone as a pure, isolated entity isn’t the end objective of advancing society. What are evident today…largely in the behavior and use patterns of the young are the combination of society, technology (largely social media) and the arts of making this manifest to the population at anytime and anywhere. Augmented realities, ubiquitous computing, mobile computing, and telematics in general acquaint us with the fact that art (visual and aural) society (social patterns, culture, economics) and technology have fused together so that we cannot even tell them apart.

So, in the creation of this department, why pull them apart? In a job why pull them apart? In the university why pull them apart? This is what is currently called a ‘mashup’ and the idea is to fuse them together. The student who studies java and html is the same student –at night perhaps-spins garage band samples at a club. What is the ‘profession’ of this student? It is a mash up also. This very student might make more of a living spinning the tunes at night in a club. The marketing and economics students who has been studying the features of broadcast marketing in the university knows that these forms are dead as a doornail. This same student who is studying ‘experiential design’ at A+T+S discovers that the class in experience design coupled with viral marketing not only is more relevant but gets her a part time paid internship with a Branding company in New York City on Skype without even leaving Seoul. At every turn of the curriculum A+T+S itself is a ‘mashup’ of traditional university education, internships, grant and funding research center, and a dynamic, relevant project driven institution. As economies, societies, and technologies ‘bottom out’, A+T+S is the place where the student, the professor, the businessperson, the NGO, look to ‘sew it back together’ and ‘mash it up’. This is keeping it real.

The real: the student spends many years and with debt spending to stay outside of a shifting job market. When he or she is ready to enter the skills are different in the marketplace.

The Mashup: Grant Group, Media without walls, and NGO projects with for profit media firms to integrate the student as they go to school.