Blended Learning Iceland (NAIP)

The students have been working in small groups where they asked and answered questions about online process, production and mediation. How can social media be a place of creativity for professional artists? What performance platforms are there on the web that can serve an artist's professional practice development? What is live and what is archive? Key concepts for the work are: rules, gaming, interactivity and co-creation. The emphasis was on creating a framework for creating and mediating music and performance material on the World Wide Web.

Students learned about the World Wide Web being a place as an aesthetic environment, as a vehicle, and as an ecology that we live and work in. They exchanged ideas and knowledge with eachother on the online environment as a platform for artistic creative processes. Furthermore, the intensive workshop served as a kick-off for the students to develop projects in groups that draw upon the online possibilities.

After the intensive week in Iceland, being inspired by cutting-edge internet and post-internet artists such as Holly Herndon and Marisa Olson,  mentored on the use of digital media and music technology, and having worked creatively in group projects the student have gained new ideas and insights to go onwards with their projects. These projects are artistically led and musically based, and in one way or another they reflect on the use of the internet as a platform, audience or an aesthetic for performing arts. The project work is facilitated in local group meetings and by ongoing peer support on a private Facebook-group, and the final projects will be published on the internet by the end of April. The students will reflect on their learning and their relation to digital media and the online platform for their own artistic development. 

What was remarkable about this intensive week, were discussions of the ethics of online art where real people have constructed the contents. How do we treat people through the arts in the internet space? Have humans become material for arts or is there place for human interaction and reciprocity? How do we as artists address this in a respectful way when using online contents as means of artistic creation? Also, there was discussion about the countless sub-cultures of the internet and internet communities and about the use of memes for mediating political statements. Also, discussion about the fact that internet art can also be offline art, reflecting on the internet outside the online settings. There is clearly a need for arts students to gain critical awareness of the internet when creating online arts.