Didactic Disruption: Roy Ascott’s Models for Arts Education and Research

Symposium:

• ISEA2015: 21st International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More presentations from ISEA2015:  

• Didactic Disruption: Roy Ascott’s Models for Arts Education and Research

• Nicholas Knouf
• Claudia Costa Pederson
• Jennifer Gradecki
• Derek Curry

• Keywords: Poetic, disruption, surveillance, counter-surveillance, art, appropriation, federal, documents, visualization, augmented reality

  This paper explores artistic practices that reappropriate released and “leaked” United States governmental documents. The steady trickle of documents from Edward Snowden’s cache, alongside the massive disclosures from Wikileaks, are only a small part of the regular release of documents via the Freedom of Information Act. This trove of material provides much fodder for artistic investigations into open culture, surveillance, counter-surveillance, drone warfare, and torture, among other topics. Nevertheless, the historical and contemporary artistic approaches discussed will focus more on poetic responses that upset a purely instrumental, objective analysis of the material. Art for Spooks and the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA) will serve as the main catalysts for exploring the efficacy of the poetic in a time of objectification and quantification.

• Full text (PDF) p. 1006-1013