Robert Sweeny

Indiana University of Pennsylvania | IUP · Department of Art

Technological dysfunction as represented in postdigital art practices can point to opportunities to rethink the incorporation of digital media in a variety of art educational settings. Theories of postdigital artistic practices represent fluid situations where fixed binaries regarding media specificity and authorship are challenged. Art educators h...

Review of: Critical Digital Making in Art Education , Aaron D. Knochel, Christine Liao and Ryan M. Patton (eds) (2020) New York, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Oxford and Warsaw: Peter Lang, 258 pp., ISBN 978-1-43317-762-0, h/bk, £84

From your perspective, what is the place of social justice education (and politics) in the art classroom? Are these topics a distraction from the disciplinary content of visual arts education, as you understand it? From your perspective, what is the disciplinary content of art education?

Post-Internet art represents a challenge to previous artistic concepts that tended to view the utilization of networked digital technologies as either the fulfillment of utopian fantasies of ego destruction, or the dystopian realization of a posthuman nightmare. Post-Internet art oscillates between these two extremes, making use of numerous interre...

In this article, art education researchers from four universities share a multisite research project dealing with teaching digital game design to preservice art educators. The research project was initially designed in response to recent trends to develop 21st-century skills in education, digital media, and art/design education, as advocated by gro...

Digital dysfunction in contemporary new media art can be used to outline possibilities for productive and even radical applications of the digital in art educational practices. In this paper, I will analyze the work of a number of contemporary new media artists who use the motif of the glitch. I will provide suggestions for pedagogical approaches t...

Performance, Transparency, and the Cultures of Surveillance by James M. Harding is a clear introduction to current conversations about theories of surveillance and how they relate to contemporary performance practices. The author provides numerous examples drawn from the disciplines of theatre, performance art, and visual art. These examples help t...

Mobile learning from a posthumanist critical perspective is the co-figuration of learner with geolocative mobile devices that blurs boundaries of the networked body. In this study, four art education researchers explore geolocative co-figurative possibilities of mobile learning. The authors theorize co-figurative agency and heighten awareness of th...

This chapter considers broad issues related to videogame design and art educational policy issues. Discussed are Science, Technology Engineering, and Math (STEM) funding proposals, and recent moves to add the arts to this equation. Following this is a discussion of Quest to Learn, and their curricular structure, which incorporates complexity thinki...

In this article I outline the theoretical underpinnings of the maker movement, and I provide the reader with a detailed analysis of how these theories relate to current discussions of making in art education. The primary research concern is to compare the implementation of digital technologies in art educational practices with the claims currently...

This paper outlines a number of ways in which contemporary life is influenced by networked digital technologies. The author specifically looks to examples from video games and social media to inquire about aspects of contemporary art educational practices that might benefit from further analysis in these areas. The notion of the machinic will be us...

In this article, the author will outline the process of setting up a makerspace in an art education program on a US university campus. The challenges that were encountered will be discussed, as will the successful elements. In the conclusion, the author will provide the reader with a number of suggestions for integrating a makerspace into art educa...

This chapter considers broad issues related to videogame design and art educational policy issues. Discussed are Science, Technology Engineering, and Math (STEM) funding proposals, and recent moves to add the arts to this equation. Following this is a discussion of Quest to Learn, and their curricular structure, which incorporates complexity thinki...

This chapter looks to early childhood learning that is informed by and presented through an understanding of the convergence of contemporary networked digital technologies and young children’s digital lives as media makers. Very young learners have at their disposal a vast media landscape that, when compared with earlier media forms, allows for unp...

Moving Mountains is a collaborative venture by eight art educators who explore the notion of distributed leadership to transcend boundaries of proximity, ideation, and artistic production. Their distributed leadership, enacted through both human and non-human performers, involved sharing knowledge and skills to create a cyberformance and machinima....

This chapter presents a description of the online new media art community, Rhizome, in order to study the relationship between new media artistic production, digital interaction, and online collaborative formations. The author makes use of interviews and works presented by new media artists and theorists in order to assess the structural and concep...

The field of art education has not looked closely at the dynamics of failure with regard to digital technologies, beyond describing ways to avoid technical glitches so that the smooth space of education is not disturbed. The notion of the machinic assemblage as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari offers art educators a diagram for failure that displa...

This article identifies possibilities for data visualization as art educational research practice. The author presents an analysis of the relationship between works of art and digital visual culture, employing aspects of network analysis drawn from the work of Barabási, Newman, and Watts (2006) and Castells (1994). Describing complex network dynami...

This work is the result of a lifetime of comic reading and collecting. Each of the images has been cut (chain-sawed), copied, redrawn, and combined, creating a visual narrative that touches upon a few major themes that are of perennial interest to art educators: the creative impulse, the relationship between psychological states of mind and artisti...

Videogames represent one of the fastest growing and most influential forms of contemporary visual culture. In this article, the author looks to five aspects of current videogames: perspective, interactivity, interface, narrative, and time and movement. Each of these videogame modalities is analyzed as related to a wide range of popular media, inclu...

Social media represent a paradigmatic shift in the use of digital technologies, and provide new possibilities for art educational application, implementation and interrogation. These technologies also challenge notions of authenticity, authorship and authority that have been central to the modernist core of the field. Individuals who are using soci...

This study examines visual dimensions and pedagogical repercussions of the war of terror. Iconographies of threat and prophylaxis are explored through a discussion of the actuarial gaze and the terr(or)itorialization of the visual field. Specific visual culture fallout from the war of terror is examined, including artistic responses and educational...

Many challenges currently face art educators who aim to address aspects of popular visual culture in the art classroom. This article analyzes the relationship between performance art and the MTV program "Jackass," one example of problematic popular visual culture. Issues of gender representation and violence within the context of Reality TV and 'ex...

Many challenges currently face art educators who aim to address aspects of popular visual culture in the art classroom. This article analyzes the relationship between performance art and the MTV program Jackass, one example of problematic popular visual culture. Issues of gender representation and violence within the context of Reality TV and ‘extr...

The “Adding Insult to Imagery? Artistic Responses to Censorship and Mass-Media” exhibition opened on January 16, 2006, in Kipp Gallery on the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) campus. Eleven gallery-based works, 9 videos, and 10 web-based artworks comprised the show; each dealt with the relationship between censorship and mass mediated image...

Current discussions regarding the notion of visual culture in art educational practice center the actions of the viewer as participant within the networks of visuality common in many contemporary societies. Surveillance technologies and techniques shift this notion of participation from active to passive, from seeing to being seen. This article exp...

Cities are shared spaces. As the massive worldwide Iraq war protests that began in 2002 indicate, the structure of the city allows for the presentation of social statements, where large groups can gather, share ideas or argue beliefs, and where media outlets can broadcast these activities. While cities enable these forms of interaction, digital tec...

Current discussions regarding the notion of visual culture in art educational practice center the actions of the viewer as participant within the networks of visuality common in many contemporary societies. Surveillance technologies and techniques shift this notion of participation from active to passive, from seeing to being seen. This article exp...

In this paper the author describes how contemporary digital technologies have changed the way in which images are constructed, distributed, and appropriated. The metaphor of cloning best describes this process, one that is dramatically different from images produced through mechanical means. Outlining an 'aesthetics of cloning,' the author proposes...

Contemporary societies are in the process of developing digital technological networks that simultaneously result in their transformation. The operations of networked computer systems, based in forms of simulation, have shifted general notions of visuality within a visual culture. Practices in art education that address these contemporary developme...

This paper explores the relationship between surveillance technologies and power as exercised in educational spaces. The theories based in the panoptic gaze as theorized by Michel Foucault provide educators with the opportunity to analyze positions of power in school settings. The critical actions of the Surveillance Camera Players represent exampl...

Contemporary societies are in the process of developing digital technological networks that simultaneously result in their transformation. The operations of networked computer systems, based in forms of simulation, have shifted general notions of visuality within a visual culture. Practices in art education that address these contemporary developme...

In this paper the author outlines multiple approaches regarding surveillance research in the visual arts and art education. The notion of the parasite is used to diagram power relationships that are addressed by visual artists and activists engaged with the mechanisms of both surveillance and dataveillance. These parasitic practices are then compar...