“How Artists Can Bridge the Digital Divide and Reimagine Humanity”

By Ilia Urgen
Section B

Over the last couple of decades, the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) movement has brought a plethora of new changes in the world’s education system. The goal of this movement is not only to improve the lives of people physically, but to also bring people closer together by changing the way we see diversity and the digital inclusion of others.

According to author Agnes Chavez, a revolution in STEAM is how we see the development of humanistic skills and creating a sustainable future. This process is even more vital in isolated, remote areas such as rural and minority communities, where the necessity to tie the gender and culture gap is even greater.

One of many possible solutions was generated through the creation of the STEMarts Lab. Students from all backgrounds get to work directly with artists whose work imagines what can be achieved with digital technology. This new form of collaboration between generations is what will lead the future in a digitally-sustainable direction.

Furthermore, the STEMarts model is revolutionizing the way the younger generation is thinking through the following pillars:

  • 21st-century skills and technology
  • Cutting-edge science knowledge
  • Real-world application and collaboration
  • New media arts and social practice

The STEMarts model is able to give people a better idea of how the world works better together with the combination of science, art, and technology. These ideas are more important now than ever before. The goal of our generation is to increase individual literacy of these fields as much as possible. The more great minds we have who are able to think critically and out of the box, the less problems our society will have. Even though this solution seems too good to be true, we’ll never know unless we try to unite these pillars by increasing STEAM literacy in our generation.

Link to Article:

https://www.arts.gov/impact/media-arts/arts-technology-scan/essays/how-artists-can-bridge-digital-divide-and-reimagine-humanity

Looking Outwards 11: Societal Impacts of Digital Art

The societal issue is in regards to copyright and how NFTs impact it. One example is how NFTs occasionally steal work from commissioned artists without their consent or permission, such as in the case of Jason Rohrer using the work of artists without their consent to sell NFTs. The article begins by detailing what NFTs are; unique tokens, most commonly a URL of some digital media which are given to individuals for ownership. However—and this is the conflict that the article highlights—that very ownership has a lot more to take into account than what the original developers may have intended. Those who have NFTs don’t actually have copyright of their NFTs, and their so-called products are still accessible and distributable to the public. To make matters worse, thousands can release unoriginal NFTs based off of digital URLs in a market that doesn’t restrict or legislate the selling and distribution of NFTs.

Link to article here

Looking Outwards-11

The article I selected is “Finding Inspiration for Art in the Betrayal of Privacy” by Jenna Wortham in the New York Times. The article focuses on an exhibition in a gallery in Lower Manhattan put on by a Berlin group called the Tactical Technology Collective. The exhibition looked at the impact of technology and how it observes us on the daily through an artistic lens. One example that they used which I found interesting was how step and activity data may be used in the future to determine insurance costs. This would cause people to “hack” their devices in order to make it seem like they moved more in order to lower their insurance costs. They also experimented with a facial-recognition software called “Churchix” to create an immersive experiment for gallery goers. The way the Tactical Technology Collective subverted technology that we use day to day lives, causes us to rethink our own relationship with technology and the way we “buy into” our own surveillance on the daily.