Lunch Bytes Life: Education/Learning

Lunch Bytes is a series of discussions, which examine the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies in relation to artistic practices. In 2014, the Goethe-Institut Glasgow and CCA collectively present three events, each of which dedicated to a specific topic. International artists, scholars, designers, curators and intellectuals are invited to give short presentations before engaging in a panel discussion.

Lunch Bytes Glasgow is part of a larger project organised by a number of Goethe Institutes in Northwest Europe. In close collaboration with local partners, the Goethe Institutes in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, Helsinki, London and Stockholm will set up discussions about art and digital culture. The project will culminate in an international symposium to be held in Berlin in 2015.

The final event in Glasgow addresses the topic of education. How has the way we teach and learn about art shifted with the rise of digital technologies?

The emerging encroachment of the digital upon numerous facets of our everyday lives intimately affects how we engage with information. Networked technologies, it has been argued, have created a 24/7 state of alertness in response to an information stream that never stops. These informational streams are highly visual too: never have we communicated so much through images. All this happens through an infrastructure that changes quickly: we constantly adapt to new platforms, tools and devices. The question then is: how do we engage with such information streams, or more precisely, how do we process their contents and cope with this informational abundance? And to what extent can we conceive of this continual processing a process of learning? How has our ability to learn been affected by this specific informational setting and how do educational institutions respond to this changing learning environment?

The current networked infrastructures have also created the condition of possibility for a specific professional personality: the constantly learning and adapting creative entrepreneur, for whom the profession of the artist today in many ways is seen as the blueprint. Next to curatorial skills, the ability to create and share content and concepts seem to matter more than ever in the networked economy where anyone with a laptop, a good idea and a social network can participate. How do art academies prepare the artist of tomorrow for this creative-technological environment? How has the model of the creative entrepreneur reshaped the role of the artist and how have the curricula of art academies responded to this?

This Lunch Bytes event discusses how we interact with information today – how our ability to learn has been affected by digital technologies and how education in the arts is being reshaped and remodelled by transforming technological infrastructures.

The panel includes:

Stephan Dillemuth, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich / Artist, München
Rohan Gunatillake, Producer / Entrepreneur, Glasgow
Sarah Lowndes, Writer/Curator, Glasgow
Cornelia Sollfrank, Lecturer in Art & Media, University of Dundee / Artist, Dundee